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by lsadam0 2924 days ago
I can understand how having a touchscreen helps with mobile development, but I have no use for touchscreen functionality in my development. I don't have a desire for my macbook to have a touchscreen at all. Further, I think the touch bar was a huge mistake. I've really gotta side with the idea of letting a desktop/laptop excel at being a computer rather than suffering from an identity problem.

All that said, we all get to vote with our dollars :)

1 comments

Just because you don't have a use (today) doesn't mean that no one has a use for it, much less that you wouldn't find a use for it tomorrow.

Touch on a laptop screen is a huge convenience, it's not a laptop identity problem. Sometimes tapping or scrolling a thing feels more natural, even on a laptop, even on any other screen that you own. Apple has used that very logic in their own marketing of the iPhone and iPad, that touching things is the more natural feel, that directly interacting with things on the screen is quite natural.

To a child growing up with iPhones and iPads, a screen without touch is "broken".

For an adult me, switching between a Windows laptop with touch to a macOS laptop without one takes a bit of mental gymnastics because I keep wanting to just tap the shiny icons to do things and I get briefly confused why the screen is broken when I try to touch them. I don't care how good you think a trackpad is, it's still sometimes faster to reach up and poke something with your pointer finger than track a pointer the long journey over to a thing. It's a nice convenience to have touch on the screen and do it directly.

Maybe that convenience doesn't interest you, that's fine, but it doesn't mean that convenience doesn't exist. (Plus, when you get into differently abled people you start to find people that that convenience starts to matter a lot more for their day-to-day happiness.)

I don’t really disagree with what you’re saying. I realize my viewpoint on this topic was Very selfish. But that is why I pointed out that we all get to vote with our money.