3 ms·

Hard disks don't increase the price tag over 16 gb ssd, memory is cheap. The fans, ports and connectors are all in the 400 € machines, so they obviously don't a

by Joeri 14y ago

Hard disks don't increase the price tag over 16 gb ssd, memory is cheap. The fans, ports and connectors are all in the 400 € machines, so they obviously don't add much to the price tag. Larger display, ok, but how much more could a 13" standard-res touchscreen cost when retina ipads have 10" touchscreens? The case doesn't have to be aluminum to feel nice, there are plenty of plastic phones and tablets that feel nice that prove this for me. You don't need an optical drive. The only price drivers i see are the battery and the chipset, and possibly an ssd instead of a hard disk. I don't buy the story that you can't build nice laptops for 700€ when the BOM cost of the retina ipad is less than 300€. Anyway, there are sub-1000 touchscreen machines that are nice, like the dell xps 12, but its obvious the vendors consider touchscreens a premium feature. They're wrong. Laptops no longer have the luxury of not shipping with touchscreens, at any price point. Even apple gets this wrong, something which amazes me. Imagine someone trying to sell a tablet with a trackpad instead of a touchscreen. The very idea is ridiculous. Every reason you want touch on your tablet also applies to your laptop.

cpleppert 14y ago
>>Anyway, there are sub-1000 touchscreen machines that are nice, like the dell xps 12, but its obvious the vendors consider touchscreens a premium feature. They're wrong. Laptops no longer have the luxury of not shipping with touchscreens, at any price point. Even apple gets this wrong, something which amazes me. Imagine someone trying to sell a tablet with a trackpad instead of a touchscreen. The very idea is ridiculous. Every reason you want touch on your tablet also applies to your laptop. Apple did usability studies on this very issue and came to the conclusion that combining a mouse and keyboard with a touch display didn't work. The screen was too far away to make using a touch device comfortable for a long period of time. Of course, figuring out how to design software that works both with a mouse/keyboard system and touch devices is a challenge. I'm not sure Windows 8 has succeeded here. I don't enjoy the metro environment when I'm using a mouse and keyboard and I don't like the desktop when I switch over to a windows 8 tablet. I'm a bit mystified by all the hype about touchscreen laptops. The use cases for tablets and notebooks are just too different and I feel that Microsoft is making the classic mistake of trying to cram as much features as possible into a product without understanding how these devies are actually used. For one consumer confusion is likely to result with the plethora of different configurations that Windows 8 devices are sold in. This a recipe for bewilderment. I still feel that Microsoft would have been much better off developing a tablet version of windows phone 8 rather than extending the desktop down to the tablet market. Now the desktop and tablet version of windows are joined together and Microsoft won't be able to respond to changing market conditions as quickly.
meaty 14y ago
Why the fuck do I want to touch my laptop (or phone or whatever to be honest). It gets dirty and stops working, you end up with curled up hands, even the best ones wobble like an old person when you push on them, you can't type on the things as they are completely non tactile, the touch resolution is so bad that all you can do is finger paint badly, doesn't work with gloves on, and everything is not designed forbthe touch screen apart from metro which is just fucking horrible and the list goes on. Its like fixing a watch with jacket potatoes on your hands. I've tried every touch device out there and they are abhorrent productivity saps. I want a laptop with a normal screen. I am actually the majority non-consumer of media opinion - you know the people who use the machine to do work. The only reason we have touch screens is hype
- corporalagumbo 14y ago
  An anecdote: I've been using my iPad everyday since I bought it. Laptops and desktops much less so (though mainly because I don't have a good work set-up atm.) Recently I was on my Macbook and someone called me on Skype. Incredibly, it took me around four seconds of prodding the "answer call" button on screen with my finger before it struck me that I wasn't working with a touchscreen! Anyway, I'm sure that won't answer all of your objections, and while I agree with you in principle - about screens wobbling for instance - I have to reject your claim that a touchscreen laptop is totally useless. At the very least, with a well-thought out new interface paradigm, you gain small-to-medium boosts in everyday productivity while losing nothing in base functionality. You only add a new interaction option while taking away none of the previous mouse-and-keyboard functionality. That's why nobody is proposing taking away keyboards from touchscreen laptops - because clearly physical keyboards are better than touchscreen keyboards. So your argument about touchscreens being bad for typing are moot, because everybody is going to just use the keyboard in that instance. I do see a lot of use for touchscreens on laptops in the sort of situation I described earlier - pushing large, clear buttons on screen. This is actually a case where current laptops are miserably unfunctional. Even on a plush, responsive trackpad such as a Macbook's, remotely manipulating a small cursor from one arbitrary spot onscreen to another arbitrary spot and clicking is very inefficient. Being able to simply reach out and tap the screen on the exact spot is much better. This use-case for touchscreen laptops could become even more widespread if popular software begins to follow Microsoft's design cues with large, clear buttons.

by Joeri 14y ago

cpleppert 14y ago

>>Anyway, there are sub-1000 touchscreen machines that are nice, like the dell xps 12, but its obvious the vendors consider touchscreens a premium feature. They're wrong. Laptops no longer have the luxury of not shipping with touchscreens, at any price point. Even apple gets this wrong, something which amazes me. Imagine someone trying to sell a tablet with a trackpad instead of a touchscreen. The very idea is ridiculous. Every reason you want touch on your tablet also applies to your laptop. Apple did usability studies on this very issue and came to the conclusion that combining a mouse and keyboard with a touch display didn't work. The screen was too far away to make using a touch device comfortable for a long period of time. Of course, figuring out how to design software that works both with a mouse/keyboard system and touch devices is a challenge. I'm not sure Windows 8 has succeeded here. I don't enjoy the metro environment when I'm using a mouse and keyboard and I don't like the desktop when I switch over to a windows 8 tablet. I'm a bit mystified by all the hype about touchscreen laptops. The use cases for tablets and notebooks are just too different and I feel that Microsoft is making the classic mistake of trying to cram as much features as possible into a product without understanding how these devies are actually used. For one consumer confusion is likely to result with the plethora of different configurations that Windows 8 devices are sold in. This a recipe for bewilderment. I still feel that Microsoft would have been much better off developing a tablet version of windows phone 8 rather than extending the desktop down to the tablet market. Now the desktop and tablet version of windows are joined together and Microsoft won't be able to respond to changing market conditions as quickly.

meaty 14y ago

Why the fuck do I want to touch my laptop (or phone or whatever to be honest). It gets dirty and stops working, you end up with curled up hands, even the best ones wobble like an old person when you push on them, you can't type on the things as they are completely non tactile, the touch resolution is so bad that all you can do is finger paint badly, doesn't work with gloves on, and everything is not designed forbthe touch screen apart from metro which is just fucking horrible and the list goes on. Its like fixing a watch with jacket potatoes on your hands. I've tried every touch device out there and they are abhorrent productivity saps. I want a laptop with a normal screen. I am actually the majority non-consumer of media opinion - you know the people who use the machine to do work. The only reason we have touch screens is hype

corporalagumbo 14y ago
An anecdote: I've been using my iPad everyday since I bought it. Laptops and desktops much less so (though mainly because I don't have a good work set-up atm.) Recently I was on my Macbook and someone called me on Skype. Incredibly, it took me around four seconds of prodding the "answer call" button on screen with my finger before it struck me that I wasn't working with a touchscreen! Anyway, I'm sure that won't answer all of your objections, and while I agree with you in principle - about screens wobbling for instance - I have to reject your claim that a touchscreen laptop is totally useless. At the very least, with a well-thought out new interface paradigm, you gain small-to-medium boosts in everyday productivity while losing nothing in base functionality. You only add a new interaction option while taking away none of the previous mouse-and-keyboard functionality. That's why nobody is proposing taking away keyboards from touchscreen laptops - because clearly physical keyboards are better than touchscreen keyboards. So your argument about touchscreens being bad for typing are moot, because everybody is going to just use the keyboard in that instance. I do see a lot of use for touchscreens on laptops in the sort of situation I described earlier - pushing large, clear buttons on screen. This is actually a case where current laptops are miserably unfunctional. Even on a plush, responsive trackpad such as a Macbook's, remotely manipulating a small cursor from one arbitrary spot onscreen to another arbitrary spot and clicking is very inefficient. Being able to simply reach out and tap the screen on the exact spot is much better. This use-case for touchscreen laptops could become even more widespread if popular software begins to follow Microsoft's design cues with large, clear buttons.