Disable the touch switches on Apple LCD monitors

Apr 26, '03 08:55:00AM

Contributed by: robg

For those that haven't seen the Apple Cinema Display LCD monitors, the bezel around the screen has two "soft touch" electronic buttons, one for brightness, and one that looks like a power switch. If you're trying to clean the bezel of the monitor, these buttons can cause problems -- especially as the Power button actually puts your Mac to sleep, as opposed to powering off the monitor!

In Macintouch's April 25th update to their special report on Cinema Displays, two readers sent in a couple of methods of disabling the touch-sensitive switches on Apple's LCD displays.

  1. Hold down Shift and Command and then click on the Displays preference panel.

  2. Quit System Preferences, then hold down Shift and Command and touch the Brightness switch on the front of the monitor.
Either of these methods should result in a new third tab ("Options") on the Displays panel (once it's enabled, you'll see it every time you load Displays, even if you're not holding the special keys down). The only thing in the Options tab is an "Enable touch switch" checkbox which is enabled by default. Uncheck the box, and the touch sensitive buttons will no longer react to touch.

When I was testing this with my display, I was unable to make the first method work, but the second worked like a charm on the first try. No longer will I put my machine to sleep just because I decided to dust the bezel on the display!

Comments (17)


Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20030426085542345