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Steve Jobs Was Wrong About Touchscreen Laptops

Posted by timothy on from the too-soon? dept.

theodp writes "Don't believe everything Steve Jobs and Tim Cook tell you, advises The Verge's Sean Hollister. Gunshy of touchscreen laptops after hearing the two Apple CEOs dismiss the technology (Jobs: 'Touch surfaces don't want to be vertical.' Cook: 'You can converge a toaster and a refrigerator, but those things are probably not gonna be pleasing to the user.'), Hollister was surprised to discover that Windows 8 touchscreen laptops actually don't suck and that the dreaded 'Gorilla Arm Syndrome' did not materialize. 'The more I've used Windows 8, despite its faults, the more I've become convinced that touchscreens are the future — even vertical ones,' writes Hollister. 'We've been looking at this all wrong. A touchscreen isn't a replacement for a keyboard or mouse, it's a complement.' Echoing a prediction from Coding Horror's Jeff Atwood that 'it is only a matter of time before all laptops must be touch laptops,' Hollister wouldn't be surprised at all if Apple eventually embraces-and-extends the tech: 'Microsoft might have validated the idea, but now Apple has another chance to swoop in, perfecting and popularizing the very interface that it strategically ridiculed just two years ago. It wouldn't be the first time. After all, how many iPad minis come with sandpaper for filing fingers down?'"

10 of 526 comments (clear)

  1. It's very possible by phantomfive · · Score: 5, Insightful

    It's very possible that the reason we think touchscreen laptops are a bad idea has nothing to do with Steve Jobs or Apple.

    --
    "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
    1. Re:It's very possible by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      It's very possible it has more to do with cheetos

    2. Re:It's very possible by ozmanjusri · · Score: 5, Insightful

      It's also very possible that the Asus Transformer range showed that a good touchscreen tablet/laptop combo is a useful bit of gear well before "Microsoft might have validated the idea".

      What's the obsession with pretending Apple and Microsoft are the only computer vendors on Slashdot? Most of the stuff they do has been done before and better by more interesting companies.

      Let's face facts, W8 is tanking because it's dull and irritating. Why keep talking it up here?

      --
      "I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
    3. Re:It's very possible by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      This. How come no other comments mention this? I don't want to clean oily fingers off my screen all day, every day. Natural oils, not even junk food. I can deal with this on my phone, but not the devices I read/write large blocks of text into 8 (who am I kidding, 14) hours a day....

    4. Re:It's very possible by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      All my cool, metrosexual, and hot chick classmates have an ipad. None of my cheetos-eating, basement-dwelling, nerd virgin classmates have an iPad.

    5. Re:It's very possible by LordKronos · · Score: 5, Insightful

      If you're too lazy to check facts, don't challenge people who post them.

      I disagree. Any troll can post false "fact" after false "fact" fast enough to overwhelm anyone else's ability to check and disprove them. Therefore the responsibility should be on the person presenting the fact to provide a valid citation (if not up front, then at least when asked for it).

  2. Really? by bmo · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Touchscreens have been around for decades. If pointing your arm at a vertical surface was such a hot idea for 8 hours a day, why have we not seen touchscreens being used everywhere for the last 30 years? NEC had an excellent touchscreen in the mid 80s. This isn't new technology and writing articles presenting it as new tech doesn't make it new.

    Gorilla arm exists. Fatigue exists. Keyboards and other stuff are better input devices than touchscreens and probably always will be, except for the times you *can't* have a keyboard or mouse/tablet/trackball/etc., like a factory floor, restaurant, bar, hospital cart in sugery, etc, where dirt, grime, bodily fluids are a threat to operation, or where ease of portability trumps having a better input device, like tablets or phones (styluses are passe).

    If touch was so superior for every day use, we'd already be using it.

    --
    BMO

    1. Re:Really? by Z80xxc! · · Score: 5, Insightful
      This is slashdot, so I can forgive you for not reading the article, but for your convenience I'll provide the relevant excerpt here:

      When Steve Jobs decried touchscreen laptops in 2010, he was merely relaying the common wisdom of decades of user experience research into "gorilla arm syndrome." Simply put, it's the idea that if you hold out your arm in front of a touchscreen for an extended period of time, it's not going to be particularly comfortable. However, that assumes an awful lot — what if you're not holding your arms out in space waiting to touch things, but resting them comfortably on a keyboard?

      We've been looking at this all wrong. A touchscreen isn't a replacement for a keyboard or mouse, it's a complement. If I want to type things on my laptop and have enough room to comfortably open that clamshell and stretch out my arms, the keyboard's still my best bet. I'm not going to touch-type 70 words per minute on a touchscreen keyboard. But when I'm in the cramped quarters of a train, plane, or standing in a line — say, when the only thing standing between a critical email and its recipient is a few dozen words and a tap of the button marked "Send" — I can grab that Windows 8 laptop by its hinged section, one hand on either side of the screen, and tap out that message with my thumbs.

      You're issuing a false dilemma by saying that it's all touch or all keyboard/mouse. It can be both, and that's the point of the article. Keyboards are usually better for typing, but using a mouse isn't always easier for pointing, and sometimes using a keyboard isn't convenient. Having touch, mouse, and keyboard all available makes sense, because you can use whichever is best for the situation you're in.

    2. Re:Really? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      The Plato "learning system" that was around at Illinois and other schools in the 70's/80's was touch screen with keyboard, and if you had to do more than an hour with it, it was tiring. Fine for one class' lab, but awful if you had to spend an entire night on it. Of course today's touch screens and UI designs are probably better, but there are thousands of people who got to experience gorilla arm in a production environment, many of whom went on to careers in silicon valley, and oddly the industry didn't jump on touch technology when that generation took over.

  3. Microsoft never ceases to amaze me by ModernGeek · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Microsoft never ceases to amaze me at their skill in manipulating the press, reviewers of tech, and a certain group of power users into pushing all of this crap down our throats. I take the word of the Independent Software Vendors that have chastised Windows 8 time and time again better than a bunch of pundits working for a bunch of sell-out bloggers and news agencies. Microsoft is a dying empire, with Windows 2000/Office 2000 being it's peak. Ever since then it's been down hill with the occasional plateau. I'm just waiting for someone else to come in and do better. Right now if you're looking to build a whitebox machine and load it up with the latest and greatest, you're going to be full of disappointment.

    --
    Sig: I stole this sig.