| ▲ | rubicon33 3 hours ago |
| Not me personally, but my wife does. She will not buy a laptop unless it has touch screen. "So get an iPad" everyone tells her. No, you don't get it. She wants the keyboard, she wants a first class desktop experience, and she wants a touch screen. Watching her work is... different. She mostly uses her laptop on her lap, on the couch, scrolling and "clicking" with touch... and when she needs to type something she slides it back slightly, and types. Almost never uses the track pad. |
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| ▲ | MrMetlHed 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| This is how my 8-year-old works on her school Chromebook. And all of the kids at her school that I've seen using laptops are similar. Touch the screen to interact, type on the keyboard. I think they're just wired to believe every screen should be touchable and go with whatever is easiest for them in the moment. |
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| ▲ | joenot443 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | A touchscreen is a way more natural and intuitive interface than a mouse cursor driven by a trackpad. If I'd never used a laptop before I'd probably do the exact same thing as the kids! | | |
| ▲ | ghusto 25 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | For interacting with a UX that's designed around keyboard and mouse? I get how it's intuitive to reach out and touch something you can see, but in terms of much of the UX it doesn't make any sense. | |
| ▲ | MrMetlHed 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Exactly. Why on Earth would they default to touching something away from the screen that's an imperfect map to it when they can just touch the thing they want directly? I've seen so many people saying they don't understand and would never use a touchscreen on a laptop, and I just have to think they've not really been around non-technical adults or children. | |
| ▲ | saturn8601 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | You lose control without a desktop and mouse. I can't even begin to count the number of times I got hit with a dark pattern where an app steers me in a direction that I can't click out of because on touch interfaces, you have less control. | | |
| ▲ | fsloth an hour ago | parent [-] | | " you have less control." Keyboard and mouse don't give you any more autonomy over the application developers state machine. I'm not sure I understand the claim of "being in control". The UX is different, sure, often. But that's not "control" over the design of the application. | | |
| ▲ | ghusto 17 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | I feel so constricted and frustrated when I have to use my phone. I often even put things off until I can get back to my computer. On a touchscreen, I can tap. That's it. Select? Tap. Move? Tap. Highlight? Tap. The only one that makes sense is draging for moving, but even that's a pain in the butt because it often misinterprets the tap+hold duration that's necessary before it works. When I'm editing text (navigating, cut-n-paste, etc.), it gets what I want wrong more often than it gets it right, I mean like 80/20. With the phone, they had a green field to design an entirely new UX for touch interfaces, so there's no legacy to blame. | |
| ▲ | mplewis an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | Sure they do, with KB/M against a browser app you can open the dev console, you can inspect element, you can do all sorts of things that you can't do in a native app for touchscreen only. | | |
| ▲ | saturn8601 an hour ago | parent [-] | | Exactly. I was planning to write these reasons but I refrained because the use cases are endless. It boils down to the fact that you can more easily escape the current context for something else. |
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| ▲ | dmd 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Huh that's really interesting because my 12 year old has been using a school-provided chromebook for 3 years now and she and all her peers almost NEVER use the touchscreen, they use the trackpad almost exclusively. And I've watched her using her ipad too, and she uses the touchscreen when she's in (her words) "that kind of app" but if she's in Google Docs she's 100% trackpad. | | |
| ▲ | MrMetlHed an hour ago | parent [-] | | I wonder if by the time she's 12 she'll switch over more and more. I suspect that the trackpad is just a little too disconnected in her brain for now, especially since we don't really do a lot of screens / laptops. I don't think pinching to zoom and scrolling quickly and tapping things far away from where the cursor is will go away easily though. | | |
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| ▲ | youniverse 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| Yes unless you've seen nontech people use a touchscreen you won't get the appeal. Some people don't intuitively use trackpads so they'll use a mouse and if they discover touchscreens that becomes a feature that needs to come with any laptop after that. |
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| ▲ | rubicon33 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Yea, it's pretty funny seeing all the posts here from people who cannot fathom why a product like this exists. It's pretty eye opening really. If it weren't for seeing someone close to me do it, I'd be in the same camp, wondering who in their right mind would use their laptop like that. | | |
| ▲ | ghusto 14 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | I've seen someone close to me do it, and I still don't understand. I've asked her to explain why she fumbled around trying to perform a simple cursor move instead of moving the mouse, and I got a vague "it's easier" (it wasn't easier). | |
| ▲ | ksec 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Same here. I couldn't understand it until like you and the comments before, saw younger generation all thought screens by default should be touchable, and other people casually scroll on the display and then return to keyboard for typing. |
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