alt Hacker NewsPretty much every school in the US has students using touchscreen Chromebooks. It's funnyish when a young person tries to touch my MacBook screen to do a quick action, and I have to tell them that it's necessary to go to the touchpad, diddle a little to find the cursor, then do a move action to get to get to the target. Dragging is even more puzzling, touch and drag on a screen vs. move, double-tap or ctrl-click, then drag, then tap to release. I'm sure some will help me with faster touchpad methods, but that aside, I've used Mac laptops for 30+ years, and generally feel that those who perceive touchscreens as a gorilla-arm problem just haven't used a touchscreen laptop. They provide a much more efficient interface for some common actions. Touchscreens are so common now that most Windows and Chrome devices have them as the norm. Always strikes me as a bit strange that Apple-priced Mac laptops lack a feature found in low-price competitors.
"Pretty much every school in the US has students using touchscreen Chromebooks."
Pfff, what a laughable claim. Meanwhile, just because people CAN use to learn something doesn't mean it's good. Touchscreen computers, especially laptops, are dumb for a few reasons. They already have a touch interface (the trackpad), and touchscreen on a computer requires dumbed-down interfaces with oversized controls and an M.O. that tolerates your hand and arm blocking your view of what you're trying to work on.
And also the screen's hinges must be (and perpetually remain) stiff enough to sustain people pressing on the screen the whole time.
With people doing so much on phones and tablets now, you can bet that when they fire up a legitimate computer, they want a computer's capabilities. That means a real keyboard, a precision pointing device, and software with a proper computer UI.