I dunno — does anyone have one of these and find it really useful?
Reshared post from +Andreas Schou
Heaved myself off my deathbed to price a new laptop for Sara. Why does every manufacturer now think I need a touchscreen on my laptop?
(1) Laptops are not tablets. You aren't fooling me into thinking I'm buying a tablet just because I can jab at the screen like an orangutan.
(2) I guess I could treat it as a tablet that's too far from my face and at the wrong height? But except for the subterranean race of humans with eyes for nipples and transparent forearms, this is basically terrible for everybody.
(3) I could ignore the touchscreen? Oops I just paid $100 for the ability to accidentally click ads with my knuckles whenever I lift my big dumb hamfingers from the keyboard.
A touchscreen laptop is like a fucking helicopter submarine. Every single feature for one operational mode is a ruinous bug for the other. Either the icons are too big or too small or the display is too close or too far away or you're making accidental inputs because you have the motor skills of a none-too-gifted infant.
Congratulations, the entire apparent market for laptops: you just talked me out of a sale.
Our people who have Win8 laptops find that it is very helpful. 8 was built with touch in mind.
I specifically got a MacBook Air because I didn't need or want a touchscreen, and not having one helps the Air price competitively and maintain twice the memory, storage, and battery life. As a lifetime non-mac guy, I consider it the best computer I've ever bought – couldn't be happier that I didn't go the touchscreen laptop route.
+George Wiman That's interesting, George. I certainly understand the panes/panels being responsive to a touch modality — but adding one more interface to keyboard + mouse would, I'd think, add complexity. (That leaves aside my work environment, where most laptop user uses a docking station with dual monitors.)
It isn't that having touch on a laptop is all that dandy, only that 8 was designed with touch in mind and the mouse as sort of an afterthought. So it is useful if you are using 8, or so our faculty tell us. I interpret this to mean; "This system would be an even bigger pain in the ass if it didn't have a touch-screen" and "Why didn't you get me a laptop with 7 on it?"
Ah. Okay, that makes sense.