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chrisfosterelli • today at 5:16 PM • 4 replies • view on HN

I have never wanted to touch my laptop screen or felt any sort of desire to do so. In fact I try really hard not to touch it so that I don't get smudges on it.

The laptop touch screen always felt like an awkward use case to me because the ideal UX for touch and KBM are so different. If you're designing for use on laptop/desktop you need to design for KBM-first -- since the majority of devices will be -- and therefore the touch experience suffers, and users with a touchscreen just use the KBM.

I don't think the average consumer cares that much about this either. I've noticed my grandparents often buy laptops with touchscreens accidentally and then proceed to mostly interact with it by accident.

Part of me wants to believe that a company like apple must/would do this right if they were going to do it but on the other hand there's the whole touch bar debacle and it doesn't seem like their foldable phone is starting off with the best reviews either.


Replies

mason55 • today at 5:26 PM

> The laptop touch screen always felt like an awkward use case to me because the ideal UX for touch and KBM are so different

Which is why I think it makes sense for certain things where you can update the experience to be enhanced for touch but not, like, daily email & web browsing. But those things that will do well with touch do seem to align with the creative side of Apple's market - things like manipulating 3D objects, moving audio tracks around, that kind of stuff, if the interface is re-thought for a touch experience then I think there's a lot there.

Certainly there are times, even just basic things like looking at pictures, where I wish I could touch my monitor like it was a tablet.

I don't want to try to tap a link on a desktop rendered website, a mouse is more precise for that kind of thing, but I can imagine a lot of use cases that will improve if you assume that a large subset of your users has some kind of touch device.

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mattrighetti • today at 5:22 PM

> In fact I try really hard not to touch it so that I don't get smudges on it.

Glad I'm not alone. Unfortunately every week I have to clean it from dust and also smudges that gets passed from the keyboard when you close the lid.

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jayd16 • today at 5:27 PM

You act like you don't use a touch screen every day. Its not some crazy impossible technology to have an oleophobic display.

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phoghed • today at 5:27 PM

I liked the Touch Bar for custom app actions, but I didn’t like that it replaced the physical keys. Not that I use any of them much besides volume.

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