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points by Mongoose 1 day ago | 0 comments

Fully willing to accept that I could be an outlier, but I have never understood how a market exists for laptops with touch screens.

[–] droidjj 1 day ago

I used to work regularly on a commuter train with a firm-provided touchscreen ThinkPad. The touchscreen was great on the train because it was faster (for many things) than reaching for the trackpad. And when you're in a sort of cramped sitting position, reaching forward feels natural.

I'm a lawyer by trade and am forced to lean on GUIs with little keyboard-control support. When I code (for pleasure), I don't miss the touchscreen, but I often miss it when I'm trying to read PDFs and Word documents on the go.

[–] aeyes 1 day ago

It would be interesting to know what ThinkPad model it was. The older ones had pretty small trackpads so they were difficult to reach.

On Macbooks the trackpad is so large that you can reach it even from the sides of the laptop and the two finger scrolling actually works without second thought.

[–] hatchoo 18 hours ago

I had the Thinkpad T480 with a touchscreen. Thinkpads were really awesome, you could easily fix that thing by buying parts from eBay.

[–] Synaesthesia 22 hours ago

Probably a yoga by the sounds of it

[–] ilumanty 1 day ago

You got me curious, which GUIs with little keyboard-control support are you using / forced to use?

[–] causal 1 day ago

Kids expect all screens to be touch ready. Chromebooks they learn on in schools are touchscreen. It will be a competitive requirement before long, I think.

[–] Louisgaga59 1 day ago

I agree with you. When I show things to my kids on my laptop, they instantly try to play with the content by touching the screen.

[–] hirvi74 1 day ago

While true, I do not believe kids are the intended market for a laptop in which the entry model starts near $3k USD.

[–] dabinat 1 day ago

Kids will grow into the next generation of adults and having a screen you can’t touch will probably feel like an anachronism to them.

[–] masterj 1 day ago

I think this is more "have grown" than "will grow"

[–] _ph_ 23 hours ago

Certainly not. But they may be in the market for an entry level Mac laptop quite soon. I don't think Apple plans to limit touch screen to their top model for a long time. It is just how Apple likes to introduce new capabilities. Also, there might be technical reasons why they tied touch to the OLED display. So I do expect a MB Air with OLED and touch some time in the mid-term future.

[–] lopis 18 hours ago

Some of these "kids" have already entered the job market, and their companies buy them laptops.

[–] stetrain 1 day ago

People who were toddlers when the first iPad came out are now in college.

[–] mahboi 1 day ago

...Chromebooks are touch screen? This whole time, I've used them assuming they aren't.

[–] fwip 1 day ago

Some of them are, some aren't.

[–] mahboi 1 day ago

I looked it up and saw which ones are, and pretty sure I was using those, haha

[–] umeshunni 1 day ago

Doesn't matter. Google killed Chromebooks.

[–] mahboi 1 day ago

Forgot that I need to refer to most Google products in the past tense

[–] apocalyptic0n3 1 day ago

I had one for work a while back that could turn around so the screen faced upward while closed, effectively making it a bulky/heavy tablet. It was convenient for walking over to someone desk and discussing a topic. But it wasn't ground breaking enough for me to ever seek something out like it again. I rarely even open my laptop these days unless I'm in a conference room.

[–] makeitdouble 1 day ago

Getting rid of the fixed keyboard helps a lot (my preferred form factor), but even in the classic laptop form factor is makes a ton of sense IMHO.

There's a lot of small niceties that pile up into a better experience, the sister comments cover a bunch of those, so I'll focus on a macos specific nice point:

iPad and iPhone apps can now get direct touch when running on a laptop, instead of the mouse mode. With this, there is now a perfect platform able to run Mac, iOS and iPad apps outside of the ill-fated Vision Pro.

That's too little to late for me, but I think many will appreciate the benefits.

[–] ikety 1 day ago

I've been trying to brainstorm a helpful use case this would bring but I can't think of anything.

I mean just imagine how jarring it is to go from touching the macbook screen to mess with your app to needing to input text. Whether you use the macbook keyboard, or the on screen keyboard, it's just kinda rough.

[–] makeitdouble 1 day ago

It depends what you value in macos. If it's the rails preventing the edge cases, and couldn't stand Windows and Linux for their laxitude, yes it's rough.

Otherwise the iPad already has to deal with it, it's not much different.

[–] nfriedly 1 day ago

I look for touchscreens when looking for a cheap windows laptop for someone because they tend to be better quality screens (IPS, decent brightness, etc.) instead of some awful TN panel that's barely visible in a well-lit room.

I don't really expect anyone to use it as a touchscreen, but if they do, at least that will work too.

[–] ramgine 1 day ago

That’s a good requirement I didn’t think of that. A bad TN panel will make me sell or toss a laptop regardless of spec. Meanwhile I’ll put up with slower speeds if the screen is nice

[–] qubex 1 day ago

Look at how many people add keyboards and trackpads to their tablets. You’re not an outlier any more than I am. I’d never want to smudge my screen with fingerprints, and I’d never want to perform the profoundly counterintuitive contortions necessary to touch and drag on a quasi-vertical surface a keyboard’s breadth away from you.

[–] vunderba 1 day ago

It seems like there’s an audience among older people and possibly children, but I don’t see a situation in which a professional at least would really or want a touchscreen. Do you really want the oil from your fingers constantly smudging up your screen, particularly a glossy one? Unless it comes with a pair of complimentary Apple windshield wipers, it's gonna get gross fast.

The only situation I could see it being useful in is if it came with a pressure-sensitive pen, so you could use it for sketching and drawing. But even then, that would only really work well if the screen folded all the way around, so it would sit flush against the base or if it opened 180 degrees, so you could lay it flat on a table without it wobbling around on a hinge.

[–] vehemenz 1 day ago

Much like the Touch Bar, I expect that Apple will learn this lesson the hard way.

[–] winrid 1 day ago

I love my touchscreen thinkpad. For some things it's faster than the mouse. Scrolling is also nicer.

[–] hellohello2 1 day ago

Touchscreens are so passé, the future is talking to your computer and having it do things for you.

[–] an0malous 1 day ago

I only found out my Switch 1 has a touch screen a few months ago

[–] dstroot 1 day ago

You’re not an outlier.

[–] SirMaster 1 day ago

I mean it's only $400 more than the LED non-touch screen.

Seems like it would be useful for app development being able to do touchscreen for the iOS and iPadOS simulators.

[–] abujazar 1 day ago

I much prefer using an actual device, which is required for a lot of other hardware features anyway.

[–] evanmoran 1 day ago

This is exactly why I'm considering it. It sounds super useful to feel the drag gestures while developing. Same with website testing when they are meant to be used on a phone/tablet mostly.

[–] mrtksn 1 day ago

I feel the same but I noticed that the boomers and Gen Z both reach for the screen when I am showing them something and they want to interact with it(i.e. scroll a page or close a window).

Maybe the the intuitive and natural way of interaction is touch and the generations between the boomers and the Gen Z are the only ones who command the skillset to use computers in any other way.

[–] mschuster91 1 day ago

Oh in university it's a godsend having something you can just run PDF Annotator on and draw with a pen directly on your laptop. (Lenovo 20KK user here, got it for 200€ at a hamvention used, even came with a 4G modem)

[–] twoWhlsGud 1 day ago

I like the annotation use case - on a Surface it can be quite nice - but it assumes a pen (I think) and the new Mac doesn't support one.

[–] mschuster91 1 day ago

> but it assumes a pen (I think) and the new Mac doesn't support one

Indeed. But there's capacitive pens around - in doubt, use a sausage, a tried and true method dating back to the early iPhone era [1].

[1] https://www.engadget.com/2010-02-11-south-korean-iphone-user...

[–] VCFundedGenYer 1 day ago

You are an outliner. Touch is standard across every device. To not have it just feels like a deduction.

Even now, I find myself resisting the urge to tap things on my Macbook display as it is.

The world moved on. Touch is standard, and Steve Jobs was incredibly wrong with his weird opinions.

This is like people arguing that a computer mouse is not necessary in 1990.