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points by Grombobulous 1 day ago | 0 comments

I would argue that once the dust settled post-Windows 8 with Windows 10 a full decade ago, the touch screen has been the opposite of what you’ve described for Windows systems. It absolutely is a harmless feature that you can ignore. There’s no reason not to have one.

Same goes for Linux. My CachyOS install on my Framework 13 Pro has a touch screen. There’s literally no downside for me having it. I don’t have to use it if I don’t want to. But if I want to scroll a website or scrub a video the option is there.

[–] tannhaeuser 1 day ago

I don't think you can say that. Windows 10+ has a tablet mode that is completely detached from desktop mode, and it's a global toggle. Switching on tablet mode brings full-screen, upscaled, simplified explorer and settings, and switches off the classic desktop launcher with paper bin, shortcuts, etc. in favor of a larger "Start"-type menu launcher. What deeper and experimental integration there was in Windows 8 had just been removed as it became clear MS couldn't quite sell into the iPad/Android tablet market or compete in terms of power management. After stripping most of Windows 8 innovations, what remains is a touch keyboard, touch mouse emulation, and a few affordances in explorer to make tablets not outright terrible, with the target audience education and mbas interested in mobile powerpoint and web/mail.

[–] disposedtrolley 1 day ago

Windows 10 had a tablet mode. Windows 11 does not - it just appropriately scales up the padding and size of some UI controls to make them easier to tap.

[–] Grombobulous 1 day ago

I’m failing to see where there’s some kind of downside here. What you describe doesn’t really sound like a bad experience.

[–] unsloppable 1 day ago

You cant figure out how those kinds of requirements might influence or curtail development in the non touch parts of the system?

We saw the same thing happen with mobile first on websites.

[–] mpyne 1 day ago

The introduction of the mouse led to developers paying less attention to keyboard shortcuts and function keys, but I don’t see anyone seriously saying computers should not have mice.

Or for that matter, that adding support for game controllers (something that has actually happened with Linux desktops) would led to curtailed development of non-controller parts.

[–] Grombobulous 1 day ago

Have you found some kind of performance or other detriment of the mere support of touch screens or is this just theoretical?

[–] jasomill 14 hours ago

I've never hard particularly good experiences with using Windows laptops as tablets, but mostly on account of form factor rather than software.

The sweet spot for me is the iPad mini, but I tend to use tablets as glorified e-readers and video players; the only serious work I do on them is reading.

With that said, I have zero problem with touchscreens or convertable form factors. In fact, I used a Surface Pro for years as my main laptop, and it was one of the best Windows laptops I've used.

But again, I'm not a big fan of mobile devices as primary computing devices unless I'm actually working on the go.

Even for commuting back and forth between an office and a home office, I'd rather just put something along the lines of a Mac Studio in a bag — for a few months last year, it was actually a SFF (not micro, weighed about 10 kg) Dell OptiPlex in an aluminium briefcase, which was fine!

[–] asadotzler 1 day ago

It's a fine experience. It's not what Apple is doing though. Apple is doing the half way experience that will leave all unhappy.

[–] Grombobulous 18 hours ago

But even an half-way experience is an improvement for a feature that costs nearly zero dollars to include.

One of the most common actions among all computer users, zooming and centering a photo, is easier with a touch screen.

Even adding just that one thing is worth having a touch screen for.

Another example: working in the iOS simulator is now way easier because you can touch your apps that you're developing for iOS and iPadOS. And, by the way, macOS can run iOS/iPadOS apps directly from the App Store, so if there's something you really want to run that you just can't find a macOS equivalent for, there you go, you can just do it and interact with the app more naturally.

[–] freehorse 1 day ago

The touchscreen laptops I have seen last years are just normal windows laptops that happen to have a touchscreen, which I assume is what you refer to as "half way experience". How are you supposed to use it any differently anyway when you cannot actually turn it into a tablet anyway by separating screen and keyboard? And my impression was not that anybody was unhappy anyway.

[–] naravara 13 hours ago

The only touchscreen laptop I ever understood the appeal of was that one Lenovo one where you can fold the bottom back to make it a literal tablet or prop up as a kickstand.

The value of “tablet mode” would mainly be if I want to do content consumption, like watch video or read a book, while on the couch or in bed since it allows a wider range of postures you can sit or lay in when you don’t have to rest it on a flat surface.

If you can’t fold it back I just don’t get the appeal.

[–] cjarrett 1 day ago

The downgrade to touch is fine for basically everyone. People clutching pearls are simply mostly uninformed or specifically worried about deep edge cases from some stupid mountain of stupid superiority.

[–] freehorse 1 day ago

"Tablet mode" was not necessary to use for touchscreen, though. As far as I remember you can have full touchscreen functionality in the default mode of windows. I had a surface pro 4 for some years and I do not remember using tablet mode ever.

Windows 8, which was tablet-oriented, was one of these skip generations of windows that nobody cares about in the end, and when the next comes everybody forgets. I never installed it anyway. I have not owned a touchscreen laptop myself since then, but from friends that have and I have used theirs, it is like OP described as a "harmless additional feature/why not", something that just makes certain interactions a bit faster.

But especially on an actual laptop, one that you cannot just separate the screen from the keyboard, stuff like "virtual keyboard" and "tablet mode" matter much less because it is not like you will take it and use it as a pure tablet anyway.

[–] mrtesthah 1 day ago

Sounds like touch screens on laptops are so great! I sure am excited about the future of touch screen Macs! /s

[–] CountSessine 1 day ago

I made this point below, but Windows 10 still doesn't have the display-real-estate efficiency of Windows 7. Windows 10 wastes all kind of screen space on large, flat surfaces that a non-touch-screen user will never use. Windows 7 wasn't as pretty as Windows 10, but it was better at displaying information.

So actually, you are harmed by this decision every day you use a Windows 10/11 laptop. You live with this every day. You just don't know what you're missing.

[–] Grombobulous 1 day ago

Windows 10/11 looks almost identical to Windows 7. I really don’t see a major difference.

But even if I accept your premise, I’ll remind you that Windows 7 came out 19 years ago. I didn’t exactly own a 27” 4K monitor in 2009, and a 14” or 16” screen laptop in 2009 would not have been thin and light like it is today. 2009 was like “my bezels are over a half inch wide” era.

The OS is fully scalable as well. You can just make it smaller in a very granular way. Windows 7 wasn’t capable of that.

[–] bityard 18 hours ago

UI designers think that an interface should look like an art project rather than a tool, and that discoverability and information density are bugs to be squashed.

[–] QuarterReptile 19 hours ago

Windows 8.1 and 10 were both better than 7.

[–] justsomehnguy 1 day ago

Let's try to imagine a situation when Win10+ UI has "the same display-real-estate efficiency of Windows 7".

Would it change anyhthing? No. Because developers of the programs what are not part of Windows aren't keen on keeping "the same efficiency". Audacity 4, Thunderbird are good examples of a bad interface - and they did it disregarding the OS UI.

[–] pmontra 1 day ago

I've been using Thunderbird since I don't even remember when and I never noticed that it's got a bad interface, unless when they broke manually sorting folders and fixed it years later. It's got the UI that a mail client has to have. GMail does have a bad UI. Sometimes I don't understand where a message ends and where a message starts. Luckily I don't have to use it.

[–] bityard 18 hours ago

You aren't going to like what's coming down the pike for Thunderbird: https://www.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/115.0/whatsnew...

They are basically throwing away the existing UI asking with its decades of refinement in favor of something that looks like what you'd get if apple mail and outlook had a disfugured child.

[–] zuhsetaqi 1 day ago

The obvious downside is that all the UI elements are unnecessarily big for all the people not using touch.

[–] cptskippy 1 day ago

They aren't. If you ever had a convertible laptop, it would enbiggen the UI in tablet mode and reduce it in laptop mode.

I rarely used tablet mode but genuinely miss having a touchscreen.

[–] smileybarry 1 day ago

Not anymore, a lot of apps (from browsers to the system UI) adapt to whether you have a touch screen and whether you use it. For example, Windows Explorer and Edge (and Chrome) still use (relatively-)compact widgets on touchscreen-less computers.

[–] kbolino 1 day ago

At 100% scaling with "Compact view" on, Windows 11's File Explorer takes 135 pixels to get from the top of the titlebar to the top of the content. The same dimension in Windows 7 is 92 pixels. That's almost 50% vertical space bloat for no discernible benefit.

[–] nagaiaida 1 day ago

unless i misunderstand the implication as to their behavior on touchscreenful computers, this would seem to poorly address the concern upthread of explicitly expecting the touchscreen hardware, and thus the concomitant software annoyances, to become effectively unavoidable

[–] Grombobulous 1 day ago

Are you making this point from the context where you’ve never tried a touch screen computer?

This isn’t an unimplemented theory. You can head over to Best Buy right now and see what it’s like to use a touch screen laptop.

I feel like all this debate is taking place in an odd vacuum where a lot of us are talking about a bunch of potential problems with having a touch screen on a computer and all these problems are already resolved.

Maybe it’s similar to the whole iPhone duo thing where Apple users are just discovering all the caveats of a foldable phone, but we’ve already gone over all of it with competitors.

[–] cjarrett 1 day ago

In general the vast majority of folks that make these comments are exactly from that viewpoint. It was a valid concern a decade ago--right now it just makes them uninformed.

[–] westoque 1 day ago

> It absolutely is a harmless feature that you can ignore. There’s no reason not to have one

what i've learning developing and creating products over the years is that harmless features tend to be the ones that cause the most problems. for ex, now you have to add touchscreen code to the OS vs previously not having it at all. and this code or feature we will support for the rest of the lifetime of that product.

[–] Grombobulous 1 day ago

While I agree with you in many cases in concept, I think it's also possible to erroneously avoid features by being too afraid of this.

In the case of touch screens, it hasn't caused a lasting problem in Windows or Linux.

[–] megablast 23 hours ago

Why would the app developer have to add touch screen code????

[–] hecifato 1 day ago

You make a good point. Windows 10 course corrected fairly heavily from Windows 8. The tablet mode was there but you could ignore it pretty easily.

However, I still feel like Apple is in their Microsoft era where they're making some of the same mistakes Microsoft have made in the past 20 years.

Aero -> Liquid Glass

Ads in the OS -> Ads in core applications

Fullscreen ads for Microsoft services in the OS -> banner ads for Apple services in the OS

Dark patterns for Windows 11 upgrades -> Dark patterns for macOS 26 upgrades

Windows Mixed Reality -> Vision Pro

I could also say Surface Duo -> iPhone Duo but at this time it's too early to tell. I also think that a touchscreen Mac is a mistake. Not because it's something Microsoft already did but because the reason a MacBook does not need a touchscreen is because Apple has best-in-class trackpads.

[–] k_roy 1 day ago

I turn it off in the bios.

1. Takes extra battery 2. I’m not touching my screen regardless. It gets dirty enough

My last three or four laptops, which never even booted Windows, have had disabled touchscreens

[–] Grombobulous 1 day ago

This is like saying you take the battery out of your Casio wristwatch at night to conserve battery.

[–] abhinavk 1 day ago

It's an one time action and it turns off touch services on Windows and prevents any app to change its behavior after detecting a touchscreen.

[–] Grombobulous 18 hours ago

My point is that it doesn't save battery so turning it off is a wasted exercise.

Apps in Windows and KDE don't really change their behavior just from having a touch screen.

I routinely forget that my Framework 13 Pro even has a touch screen.

[–] k_roy 9 hours ago

> My point is that it doesn't save battery so turning it off is a wasted exercise.

Every watt matters, and turning it off hurts nothing I care about.

And apps DO change their behavior. The on screen keyboard pops up when the screen on a KVM connects before the keyboard.

Why the hostility? I’m not going to touch my screen anyway to try to avoid making it filthy.

[–] jtbayly 1 day ago

The UI is worse, which is the GP’s claim, and you don’t address that at all?

[–] Grombobulous 18 hours ago

The UI isn't worse though, it's literally the same. It's just an additional option you have to be able to touch the screen. I routinely forget that my Framework 13 Pro even has a touch screen. I don't really care that it does because that functionality of the computer cost a single digit amount of dollars to include in the design.

I'll list out two immediate benefits with zero UI changes that macOS touch screen users will get:

iOS developers will be able to touch their apps in the simulator.

Pinch/zoom/centering photos will be highly intuitive for basically everyone because basically everyone has family photos and a photo library.

[–] Exoristos 1 day ago

The way you describe it, this release amounts to an extremely large and expensive Touch Bar.

[–] Grombobulous 18 hours ago

There's nothing expensive about touch screens. They are nearly free to include in a bulk custom laptop panel design.

Go over to the Lenovo/Dell/HP website and you'll see that they offer a touch screen option for something like $50 and you can just choose whether you have it or not.

Go buy a $450 iPad from Apple and it has a touch screen. That's cheaper than any Mac on sale.

Hey, that's another great point, maybe Apple's laptops could be more customizable and modular, wouldn't that be nice?

[–] Exoristos 11 hours ago

You had me until the whining.

[–] VerifiedReports 1 day ago

Disagree. The Windows UI is now an absolutely dysfunctional shitshow. It never recovered from Microsoft's half-assed touchscreen adventures.

[–] sublinear 1 day ago

I agree. KDE is by far the best desktop environment for Linux laptops with touchscreens.