[flagstaffaz]

One thing you have to give apple credit for is (usually) not jumping on the bandwagon until they have a compelling solution. Pre-release, the iPad was rumored to be a netbook during that craze but netbooks died and the iPad is still here. I'm curious to see if/how they improve beyond just adding a touchscreen to the macbook.

[qwytw]

Netbooks turned into chromebooks/ultrabooks though. Back then laptops were fat and heavy so in a way the entire market had to shift to make netbooks irrelevant.

iPad with an attachable keyboard is pretty close to a netbook to be fair (Microsoft even shipped a crippled version of Windows specifically for netbooks, of course it was still way less "crippled" than iOS/iPad OS is compared to macOS. Maybe Apple will fix that with touchscreen support on Mac and finally bring then closer to iPads, since that seems to be what everyone wants)

[BoorishBears]

During the height of the touchscreen ultrabook craze I had a "touchscreen MacBook" by setting up my Zenbook as a Hackintosh.

It honestly wasn't that useful past being a party trick: it's not very ergonomic to touch a laptop screen unless it folds completely like a convertible laptop. A convertible MacBook could be interesting, but that's already the niche the iPad Pro seems to try to fill despite its OS hangups.

And like the article mentions the OS X UI is not at all designed for touch input, touch targets are tiny, lots of precise movements to navigate menus, etc.