from Hacker News

Is Microsoft Right About Touchscreen Computers?

by Snapps on 11/1/12, 1:41 AM with 47 comments

• by adriand on 11/1/12, 3:00 AM

  On the rare occasions when my five-year-old son gets his hands on my Macbook, he frequently tries to interact with it by tapping and swiping the screen. Growing up with tablets around, this is natural to him. I know that's just one anecdote, but it's enough to make me think that the OP is right that regular, non-tablet computers will commonly have touch screens.

• by edanm on 11/1/12, 7:32 AM

  The BEST thing about a MacBook laptop, in my opinion, is the trackpad. The ability, even if it's only partial, to scroll with gestures, move things around by "dragging them" with 3 fingers, and so on, is simply so much nicer than any use of a mouse.

  I don't really know why, I just know that it makes me really happy to use the trackpad. It feels natural.

  This, to me, is a sign that we are definitely heading towards something that involves Touch to a much larger degree.

  I can't imagine touch being on every computer monitor, because my arm would get tired. I mean, I'm now leaning back on my chair with my keyboard on my lap, with my monitor pretty far away - I wouldn't be able to do that if I had to touch the monitor. Still, the world of computer interaction is going to be a very interesting one over the next few years, that's guaranteed.

  These are really great times we're living in.

• by chrismorgan on 11/1/12, 2:28 AM

  The article's title is "Microsoft Is Right About Touchscreen Computers", not the interrogative form as this post's title currently is. It should be corrected.

• by jonah on 11/1/12, 7:33 AM

  I'm still not convinced that "touchscreen computers" will help with general purpose content creation.

  I have yet to see how touching the screen will help me write software (or a word document for that matter) better or that my finger is precise enough to design with.

  Content consumption, web browsing, social sharing, all that stuff sure. I have modern smartphone and a couple tablets - they're pretty awesome. But bringing extending the touchscreen paradigm to the machine I use to do "work" - I'm just not seeing it yet.

• by potatolicious on 11/1/12, 3:34 AM

  I think Microsoft is, at least in concept, on to something.

  Whether or not they're right is a matter of execution - not only on their part, but on the part of the OEMs who have a nasty habit of doing the most short-sighted things possible.

  A general purpose tablet computer, with the right feature set, with the right price point, and most importantly, with the right user experience, can be huge. But of all the Win8 devices I've seen, none of them are close enough.

• by mgkimsal on 11/1/12, 3:11 AM

  I played with 3 Win8 touchscreen computers at a store the other day. The big 'all in one' one - from HP I think - was just not good. You might get used to it, but I didn't like it. The dragging - which you end up having to do a lot of - was pretty slow, and no amount of poking around in the system settings showed a way to change the responsiveness. Secondly, it doesn't seem that there's any sort of speed sensitivity - flicking an ipad screen fast or slow changes the speed of the scrolling; that didn't seem to be the case on the systems I used (nor on my win8 system here, but it's not touch).

  The two touch-enabled laptops I tested were more responsive and a better experience, although the speed of scrolling issue was still there. I suspect hardcore geeks may not adapt to these for some time - they're very 'eye candy' focused, and reduce your ability to do things with keystrokes. For the crowd that still meticulously watches their hand move to the mouse, then moves the eyes back to the screen to watch the mouse move, slowly, up to a menu, then click, then wait, then select an option, when just hitting 'ctrl-s' would do the trick, I suspect they'll like touchscreens for more of their daily work. Me? For now it'll be a niche thing.

• by knieveltech on 11/1/12, 6:02 AM

  So touchscreen's coming back into vogue? Great in a tablet format. For standard computer monitors this is a major ergonomics no-no: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Touchscreen#.22Gorilla_arm.22

  Of course if this leads to light-table style hardware that could be pretty awesome.

• by TimGebhardt on 11/1/12, 4:32 AM

  Well don't forget that they were doing tablets all the way back in 2002. They just didn't have the foresight or guts to revamp the ecosystem around it. So the tablets didn't work because they needed to take advantage of the existing mouse-based Windows ecosystem of software, most of which was just too cumbersome to use on a tablet with a stylus.

  It took the internet about 10 years to really take off too and there were a lot of visionaries in the early 90s that just couldn't survive until the hockey stick growth really started to take off and validate their assessments.

• by jefflinwood on 11/1/12, 3:20 AM

  I went to the Microsoft Store to see if the Surface RT was worth picking up - I ended up being more impressed by the touchscreen Intel notebooks they had out running Windows 8.

  I do think Microsoft is on to something with Touch and their new UI. Unfortunately, I felt that the touch interface was pretty useless on the old Windows 7 UI and MS Office.

  I wonder how much confusion there will be with the move to Touch, and non-"Windows Modern UI"/Metro apps. It feels like Apple is moving OS X towards iOS and touch friendly, but they are doing it very gradually.

• by WalterBright on 11/1/12, 5:20 AM

  Having a laptop with a touchscreen is a surprisingly big deal. Big enough that I bought one for just that feature, and the Apple laptops without it seemed suddenly old fashioned.

• by splicer on 11/1/12, 3:23 AM

  I think the reason Apple reversed the default trackpad two finger scroll direction is because they plan on releasing Macs with touchscreens in the near future.

• by allertonm on 11/1/12, 5:29 AM

  There might be something to this. Despite Jobs' statements about the usefulness (or otherwise) of upright touch screens, accessory manufacturers have been catering to people who want to use their iPad upright literally since day one. Apple itself is doing this with the Smart Cover. So if that's OK, does adding a physical keyboard laid flat to the equation somehow turn it wrong? Seems like a stretch.

• by mmanfrin on 11/1/12, 6:09 AM

  What's with the editorializing of the articles title here?

• by nextstep on 11/1/12, 5:22 AM

  This whole article got me excited! Maybe Windows 8/RT and Surface aren't a miserable failure. I'm hopefully because at the very least, this will force Apple to innovate harder.

• by ivarchan on 11/1/12, 6:49 PM

  having a touch screen when writing touch enabled HTML5 games has come in handy

• by drivebyacct2 on 11/1/12, 5:32 AM

  I think people are really missing the point of Surface if they think that the focus is on touch+classic. It's about supporting classic. And supporting touch. And it does, Metro-with-mouse takes getting used to, but it can be done.

  The Surface RT can play the iPad role.

  The Surface Pro can play the iPad role and the laptop role.

  That's why what Microsoft is doing is risky but has the potential for user value: For some reason, people really want to use Android apps on their computer. Think about the number of apps and games that would be available? That's what Microsoft is getting out of this. Developers get to target both casual users and pro users. And pro users who are casual users after 5PM.

  I don't plan to buy a Surface, but I see a lot more potential than I think others are really willing to see if they're honest with themselves.