It’s not like there haven’t been touchscreen laptops before. But when we used them, we were left wishing we could use them more like tablets. We’ve also seen convertible laptops, but those were bulky, heavy and terrible. Sure, a lot of that terribleness was because the software and hardware were pisspoorly executed, but the concept is still terrible all by itself.
Just like PC UIs were never meant to be shoehorned into a tablet form factor, tablet UIs were never meant to be shoehorned into a PC/laptop form factor. Years after their first mainstream release, touchscreen all-in-one computers are largely still gimmicks, with no real advantage/utility/purpose to justify their existence. And that’s before even considering the issues with physical interaction. (To be clear, we’re talking about traditional laptops with touchscreens bolted on here, not convertible laptop/tablets.)
A touchscreen laptop is an ergonomic nightmare. When we use touchscreens, we generally hold them close to our bodies like books. Imagine reaching your arm out, tapping and poking at your screen for extended periods of time. No, seriously: Sit at a desk, in front of your laptop, and imagine you were using an app. Try holding your arm up for two minutes. If you try to play Fruit Ninja on a touchscreen laptop, your arms will fall off.
And what would you do with a touchscreen on a traditional laptop that trackpads can’t already handle? If your laptop has a good trackpad with decent drivers, you can probably pan, pinch, scroll and zoom just fine. Without flailing your arms around. Are you going to touchscreen game with your laptop? Play a virtual instrument? Long story short, 99 per cent of any benefit a touchscreen laptop could provide has already been accomplished by multitouch trackpads. Anyone wanting a touchscreen so bad will be better served by a standalone tablet.
Touchscreens may provide a more pronounced degree of mental intuitiveness, but not at the expense natural physical movement. A photographer, or video editor or graphic designer could find use for a touchpanel on their laptop. But the masses will not have the same needs.
So yeah, it’s possible that Windows 8 will make touch computing on a laptop not a total trainwreck. And we’ll probably see some touchscreens on traditional laptops as a result. But just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should.
Banana
Friday, December 9, 2011 at 10:20 AMMicrosoft devs have been using touch enabled laptops for years. Its been great for demos and discussing projects especially in retail where touch enabled software is everywhere.
Now that tablets are everywhere it just makes the experience consistent.
My 2 year old is constantly trying to touch the screen of my desktop to interact.
Steve
Friday, December 9, 2011 at 8:48 PMMy mother’s PC has a touch-screen and it irks me. It’s obvious that a laptop form-factor wasn’t designed for touchscreens. It’s a perfect example of 2011 Gorilla Arm. Manufacturers shoving touchscreens anywhere they can, with no thought into the user experience of having to navigate a parallel panel to your face.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Touchscreen#Gorilla_arm
On top of that, a laptop screen is hinged and even light touch can push the screen back. It’s not solidly supported by the other hand, as in the case of a tablet.
light487
Friday, December 9, 2011 at 10:22 AM“Anyone wanting a touchscreen so bad will be better served by a standalone tablet.”
But if it can do BOTH just as effectively, where is the harm? Sure, the hybrid is a new thing and it has a little ways to go yet before they are just as effective in both modes.. but having using the ASUS Transformer with dock attached and seeing how it looks and act exactly like any other 10″ netbook, which then almost magically transforms into a 10″ tablet, I can say without a doubt that I would prefer to have both.
The ability to “intuitively” switch from keyboard/mouse to touchscreen without reaching for the Wacom tab is such a wonderful and visceral feeling of freedom. Therein lies the beauty of it: it’s intuitive. You are sitting there typing out your word document and then you want to switch to another app.. instead of alt-tabbing, you lean barely an inch forward as your hand intuitively reaches forward to the screen and with a flick of your finger, you have switched to the other application. It’s the Google Maps application and you want to zoom in, so rather than double clicking or scrolling the mouse wheel, you intutively pinch zoom on the exact spot you are pointing at…
“Just like PC UIs were never meant to be shoehorned into a tablet form factor, tablet UIs were never meant to be shoehorned into a PC/laptop form factor.”
Says who? You?
“with no real advantage/utility/purpose to justify their existence. ”
Uhm.. right.. so if the laptop, without detachable keyboard is able to do EVERYTHING exactly the same as one without a touchscreen, again I ask you.. where is the harm in that?
“A photographer, or video editor or graphic designer could find use for a touchpanel on their laptop. But the masses will not have the same needs.”
I am none of the above specialist users… yet I can see the merits in this technology.. I fail to understand how you can not and be so negative about it as to write such a lengthy article about it.
TSH
Monday, December 12, 2011 at 4:12 PM+1 to this, more or less.
Although, I would still say that alt-tabbing is faster than using the touchscreen :–P.
The article is about *ultrabooks* specifically, but I think there’s a better question. All they need to do is include a capacitive layer that is a fraction of a mm thick – the rest is done by MS and the UI. As such, why *wouldn’t* you have a touchscreen on your ultrabook?
Over It
Friday, December 9, 2011 at 10:25 AMToo much bias here… Just because a laptop could be built with touchscreen capabilities doesn’t mean it needs to be used that way all the time. I can see the metro UI being used more with touch rather than with a mouse. Agree it would be reduculous using word with a touchscreen all day, but you could pick and choose when to touch vs when to use a mouse. This is the same comparison as using a keyboard vs. a mouse – I use CTRL+C a hell of a lot more than using a mouse to do the same thing.
MotorMouth
Friday, December 9, 2011 at 10:38 AM“And what would you do with a touchscreen on a traditional laptop that trackpads can’t already handle?” Well, just copying/pasting this quote gives us a perfect example. The full width of the trackpad was not enough to highlight the whole sentence, so I had to use two hands to do it. OTOH, if I was using a touch-screen, I could have done it with one hand. That’s what shits me about trackpads – they don’t map one-to-one with the screen. That’s why I hate them (although the one in my Zenbook is not too bad, mostly).
Quite a few times I’ve found myself touching the screen to try and pan or zoom a Bing Map, simply because it seems so natural. As long as the touchscreen is added to the existing human-interface devices, rather than replacing them, I can’t see why you wouldn’t want it.
Sam
Friday, December 9, 2011 at 10:48 AM“…Quite a few times I’ve found myself touching the screen to try and pan or zoom a Bing Map, simply because it seems so natural…”
Do you do all your daily activities in public naked because it feels natural too? Seriously dude, by now I thought everyone would have become familiar with the physical limitations of PCs these days…
light487
Friday, December 9, 2011 at 10:57 AMYes but now there is a very real possibility to get around a few, though not all, of those interface limitations.. just because it has been so, for so many years, doesn’t exclusively mean it should remain so.
Sam
Friday, December 9, 2011 at 11:00 AMI never said that that current limitations of how user’s manipulate their computers can’t (or won’t) change – I’m saying is touching the screen “because it feels natual” sounds like the actions of someone who doesn’t put enough thought into what they’re doing.
Seven13
Friday, December 9, 2011 at 12:54 PMI use touchscreens every single day. I have an Android phone, I use the Touchscreen ticket machine on Cityrail, and when I get to work, sure our office computers are normal non-touch affairs, but I deal with some fairly complicated electronic control systems which are all controlled by….you guessed it, touchscreens. Oddly enough, when I come back into the office, after “naturally” using all these touchscreens, when I sit in front of one of our MacBooks, I find myself reaching out to swipe left or right or pinch to zoom!!
Touch has become almost mandatory in the last 5 years because of, yes, its “natural” and tactile feeling. There is nothing wrong with that, and expecting things that don’t have touch to have it doesn’t mean you’re not thinking…..it means you’re wishing someone would come up with a touchscreen on a laptop!!
MotorMouth
Saturday, December 10, 2011 at 4:37 AMSam, what a strange analogy. I have worn clothes all my life and being naked in pubic feels anything BUT natural (but hasn’t stopped me doing it on occasion, of course). Its about what you’re used to and given that I have a couple of touchscreen devices that I use all the time – phone and ZuneHD – the habit forms very quickly. The fact that I was specific about doing with maps, which I probably use more on my phone than my PC, should have given you a clue, I’d have thought. I’d never even think of trying to swipe or pinch the screen in 3DS Max.
Sam
Saturday, December 10, 2011 at 9:33 AMI may have been a little gruff on the topic – I hadn’t had my morning coffee, sorry if it came out the wrong way.
At the end of the day, I can see it have some level of use, but I think any implementation would need to supplement existing functionality, not replace it.
Zuel
Tuesday, February 28, 2012 at 8:45 AMCraig Posted on I don’t know if 8 hours of ultiity there’s much or not. But I wouldn’t buy a HP mini laptop, because first of all it’s more expensive than a normal dimensioned laptop.Not running modern games on high detail settings is a bad point also.
Internet Elitist
Friday, December 9, 2011 at 10:42 AMI’m sure before long the prices of components will be/are at the point that its no big difference between touch capable or not so at that point why wouldnt you include it? Complaining about it is just complaining for complaints sake.
You wouldn’t complain a laptop has more usb ports or bluetooth you have to use for or whatever, its there, you might not use it, if it costs no more i don’t really see the harm. And im in no rush to own a touch laptop but if at next upgradei can get one at no extra cost, its a no brainer.
Sam
Friday, December 9, 2011 at 10:45 AMI can see how duplicating functionality so that both a touch screen and keyboard/touchpad/mouse offers the same functions – but there is a few things about this concept I don’t like:
- Finger prints, they’re bad enough on my smart phone, I don’t want them on my laptop too.
- The achiles heal of laptops are the screen hinges, plus by design of laptops usually dictate they a little top heavy, and I don’t see it being too hard for laptop to rock backwards when the screen is pushed. That’s not to say that I think touchscreen laptops would suffer from turtle-on-its-back syndrome, but I can see the screen bobbing back and forth when touched.
Tim
Friday, December 9, 2011 at 11:27 AMDon’t want fingerprints, don’t use it or wait for a true oleophobic coating for the screens.
- I don’t know what dodgy laptops your using, but every laptop ive ever used was a lot heaver in the lap part than the screen part, and the amount of force required to push the laptop over is considerable compared to the gentile touch of modern day capacitive touchscreens (a resistive screen, yes you may have some rocking).
I would love a touch screen on my laptop and desktop screen that i could use every now and then for certain tasks, esp for using some metro stuff in Win8. Also when typing it will often be faster to be able to touch a screen than to move the hand to the mouse, locate where on the screen the mouse is, move the mouse to the desired point and click.
MotorMouth
Saturday, December 10, 2011 at 4:42 AMI’m with you on fingerprints but I think your other points area little spurious. I’ve never heard of anyone’s screen hinges breaking and pretty much all laptops these days have LED backlit screens, so they are not top-heavy at all. Sony’s P Series machines were even designed to be gripped by the screen edges, with a tiny trackpad and mouse buttons built into the bezel.
Dom
Friday, December 9, 2011 at 10:46 AM+1 to this article.
I draw a parallel to this with the introduction of 3D to TVs. The longer a product is out, the cheaper it becomes to produce and thus the retail price is lowered. To keep the standard price of a product artificially high, the industry scrambles to introduce new features and technology that are touted as the ‘latest and greatest’ regardless of whether the majority of people actually want or care about them.
Tech like this does have a place, but it is not a natural progression – laptops function just fine for the majority of users without touch ability. Unfortunately I see this being promoted as a ‘must have’ feature which will inevitably lower the available choices for non-touchscreen laptops and everyone will end up paying more.
mark b
Friday, December 9, 2011 at 11:11 AMi think it would be great. wanted this for years. wouldn’t be surprised if apple eventually releases such tech in their macbook airs..
light487
Friday, December 9, 2011 at 1:57 PMYup.. and the crazy/ironic thing is that when Apple do it, it will suddenly be like the word of God says that it’s a good idea.. yes, I am being facetious but it’s not far from the truth.
shane
Friday, December 9, 2011 at 11:27 AMI agree that the touch screen ultra book is a dumb idea? UNLEss the screen can flip and twist to cover the keyboard. hang on…. now I have a tablet sized device when I need it. Awsome
StevoTheDevo
Friday, December 9, 2011 at 11:30 AMPersonally I’m holding out buying a tablet in the hope that Ultrabooks fill the nice of both Laptop and Tablet.
As such, I expect my Ultrabook to have a touchscreen. They have the tablet form factor (with some extra weight).
Windows 8 with it’s touch interface and regular desktop is the Perfect combo OS to match a combo tablet/laptop.
As long as it’s done right, what’s the problem?
Blake
Friday, December 9, 2011 at 11:51 AMI would love it if I had a ultraportable laptop that I could open, rotate the screen 180 degrees again and use as a tablet.
I don’t see it being used in tandem, I see it having two options for two situations.
Seven13
Friday, December 9, 2011 at 12:56 PM+1! I’ve put off buying laptop for literally years because I use windows and they’ll all too bloody slow and clunky. But now with Win8, if it was an Ultrabook, with an SSD AND a swivel touchscreen….heaven. I wouldn’t care if it was $3K.
MD
Friday, December 9, 2011 at 3:15 PMLaptop Slow…
I was running some CFD simulations earlier this year on my Quad core (Granted it is a few years old now Phenom 1) Desktop, and it was taking a bit long (as anyone doing CFD analysis will know) so I decided to Use my Wife’s Laptop to run a few while I was at it… (as well as an older single core P4 laptop of mine…)
The Phenom Ate the P4 (understabably)
The I7 plaptop (non-sandy bridge) ate the Phenom in terms of processing speed. What was taking 13 hours to do on the Phenom only took 5-6 hours on the Intel I7. (more like 20 plus for the P4)
So No, laptops running windows are not slow. Not any more.
Seven13
Thursday, December 15, 2011 at 11:57 AMI don’t mean processing, I mean startup. I had an MSI GT780. Core i7, 8GB RAM, 1.5GB GTX560M Graphics….and it still took 3.5 minutes to boot up, from scratch with just anti-virus and a few small taskbar programs……3.5mins for a computer that’ll run Crysis at almost 50FPS in highest graphics mode??? They’re powerful, but they’re still slow because they’re severely limited by the HDD, a normal 7200RPM HDD….until the SSD finally becomes affordable…..
Wok
Friday, December 9, 2011 at 1:30 PMI think all in one desktops will become far more useful.
Laptops… hmm… maybe for a bit so long as there is still a trackpad and traditional Windows UI it’s all good.
light487
Friday, December 9, 2011 at 2:00 PMTotally.
The more options the better I say.. if it doesn’t cause a detriment to the existing functionality, I just fail to see the problem with it. If it meant slowing down the performance or somehow getting in the way of existing productivity.. fine… but when they are equal with greater amount of interface/usability options… what’s the downside?
Andrew
Friday, December 9, 2011 at 3:08 PMHaving ACTUALLY USED a touchscreen Windows 8 laptop for about a month, I catagorically reject almost every point made in this article.
Navigating a website with touch is excellent… and then BAM, I could punch out an opinion on the keyboard without a moment’s pause.. like this.
Most of the time I used it, it was on my lap, and I can say that there’s something about it which is absolutely intutiive. There’s somthing about the keyboard being a natural stand for the screen. I didn’t have to hold the screen up leaving two hands free when not typing. For some reason I left palms on the palm rest.. it seemed natural. If you currently spend any time surfing on the couch with your laptop, you will instantly understand how natural it actually is to use.
…and then there’s my 3yo niece who already expects that all screens are touch screens. She’s confused why nothing happens on a laptop when she touches the screen.
It comes down to simple navigation. Just a few seconds here or there when you move stuff about the screen or switch or launch a new app. It makes the touchpad seem oh so fiddley by comparison (not that it isn’t already), It’s a pleasuarable experience and the ‘lighness’ (excellent responsiveness) brings you closer to the content. As soon as you move to content creation tho, it becomes just as bad as the iPad.
The docking tablet is where it’s at IMO. The touchscreen laptop also has it’s place tho. On the netvertible I used, I only ever switched it to tablet mode a few times. The keyboard/touchscreen was simply the best arrangment for the vast majority of the time.
And seriously, who uses fruit ninja as a primary use-case scenario?? It’s all about simple navigation.
I see this article as preemptive trolling from an uninformed perspective. You have all the resources available to you to check it out for yourself. That said, I suggest you don’t. The only complete trainwreck here is this article and I wouldn’t enjoy a repeat performance.
jason
Friday, December 9, 2011 at 6:10 PMi want one.
i wouldn’t use it as the primary interface but i believe that it is pretty much expected (or will be soon) that all screens have touch capability.
certain tasks are quicker with one and others are better with keyboard and mouse, having both options constantly available is better imo.
Sicarius123
Friday, December 9, 2011 at 7:15 PMFor what possible reason would I want a touchpad over a touch sccreen? There are only pluses here!
If you want to use a mouse, they’re not taking your USB port or bluetooth away.
Steve
Friday, December 9, 2011 at 8:49 PMA touchpad is rested and allows you to navigate using only your palm and fingers. It’s easy, ergonomic and doesn’t tire your arm, unlike a vertical touchscreen that requires your arm to be outstretched for extended periods.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Touchscreen#Gorilla_arm
cflow
Monday, December 12, 2011 at 5:03 PMI had a touchscreen Acer laptop. It was ace. Whenever I used a laptop after I was annoyed with the limitations placed on the interface by not being touchscreen.
FYI I wasn’t interested in using the touch-screen for gaming, but just interacting with internet, file management and video I found it to be an awesome capability I now find lacking in my non-touch HP laptop.
For those that are arguing ergonomics, you need to use one before commenting. I never felt overtaxed by “stretching” – you do know that the laptop is a short distance to move from the keyboard to a screen yeah?
davec
Friday, January 27, 2012 at 10:08 PMI’d find a touch screen laptop that allows the keyboard to fold behind the screen useful in meetings. This would provide full computer functionality without the psychological barrier presented by the screen.