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Comment by ianai | Hacker News Reader

Apple shows no signs towards being interested in selling a touch screen laptop. They steer people to their iPads for that and have indicated otherwise for their laptops. Rightly or wrongly.

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Jobs famously said quite strongly that they'd never do one. There is a video around of him justifying it due to the user's hands getting too tired https://www.youtube.com/watch?reload=9&v=S9ZJHy8QOso .

After 12 years on Macs I picked up a touchscreen PC and would simply never go back to a non-touch machine, it is not essential, but it is incredibly convenient. Why shouldn't it be possible to touch rather than tap when appropriate? After a few months selecting an appropriate option for any particular input is totally natural and subconscious. I have no idea why noting the lack of touch on a Mac should be considered "biased".

I picked up a Dell touchscreen laptop and literally have never used the touchscreen. I even forgot it has it. I just can’t see any reason to use it and how it’s better.

I probably use it for around 10-15% of navigation and scrolling on web sites. It's not a case of "I'm on a web site designed for a touch device, I will therefore now start poking the screen", but more along the lines of noticing it'd be much quicker to work a sequence of buttons by touch than by tap.

Touch is definitely much faster to get through certain styles of forms. The first that came to mind where I'd often tend to touch is the TFL (Transport for London) journey planner.

My work provided laptop has a touch screen. I only ever use it when I'm trying to point out something on the screen and touch the screen by accident. It's always jarring.

Does {tab}/{space} not work in some forms?

As it happens, tabbing around a badly designed form often doesn't work correctly. Then there are UI with hundreds of focusable inputs where while tabbing might work correctly, is extremely cumbersome and slow to use.

This is not to suggest replacing a keyboard with a touchscreen, any more than suggest a keyboard is no longer required since a mouse or trackpad is available. It's just an additional form of input, and one I'd personally definitely miss.

I agree with you. The keyboard/mouse has been a standard input combination for PCs since the 80s. Maybe it's time we added touch to the standard. Seems some additional input methods are likely well past due.

He also said “they’ve lost their way if they ever give you a stylus” and then Apple Pencil. But I do agree and even like the Apple Pencil. I wish they saw themselves a little more like a “batteries included” company trying to deck out their stuff with features people may never use than now. But I also think that’s always been a criticism of Apple.

I will add this though. You can side car a tablet to your Big Sur Mac. Pretty sure it stays touchable through to the Mac client.

The stylus comment was more of a quib on clunky resistive touchscreen which forced phones to come with a stylus rather than the idea of drawing with a stylus being bad.

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