I would argue that once the dust settled post-Windows 8 with Windows 10 a full decade ago, the touch screen has been the opposite of what you’ve described for Windows systems. It absolutely is a harmless feature that you can ignore. There’s no reason not to have one.
Same goes for Linux. My CachyOS install on my Framework 13 Pro has a touch screen. There’s literally no downside for me having it. I don’t have to use it if I don’t want to. But if I want to scroll a website or scrub a video the option is there.
I don't think you can say that. Windows 10+ has a tablet mode that is completely detached from desktop mode, and it's a global toggle. Switching on tablet mode brings full-screen, upscaled, simplified explorer and settings, and switches off the classic desktop launcher with paper bin, shortcuts, etc. in favor of a larger "Start"-type menu launcher. What deeper and experimental integration there was in Windows 8 had just been removed as it became clear MS couldn't quite sell into the iPad/Android tablet market or compete in terms of power management. After stripping most of Windows 8 innovations, what remains is a touch keyboard, touch mouse emulation, and a few affordances in explorer to make tablets not outright terrible, with the target audience education and mbas interested in mobile powerpoint and web/mail.
Windows 10 had a tablet mode. Windows 11 does not - it just appropriately scales up the padding and size of some UI controls to make them easier to tap.
The introduction of the mouse led to developers paying less attention to keyboard shortcuts and function keys, but I don’t see anyone seriously saying computers should not have mice.
Or for that matter, that adding support for game controllers (something that has actually happened with Linux desktops) would led to curtailed development of non-controller parts.
> The introduction of the mouse led to developers paying less attention to keyboard shortcuts and function keys, but I don’t see anyone seriously saying computers should not have mice.
Well, a lot of devs did move back to the terminal ;)
I encourage it! I think having to deal with switching between mouse and keyboard actually accentuates why the terminal is nice as an interface so often. If it does nothing more than make someone building a terminal app think just a bit harder about where to be intentional about user workflows so that a mouse is not even required then it may even have helped keyboard-only uses.
But even an half-way experience is an improvement for a feature that costs nearly zero dollars to include.
One of the most common actions among all computer users, zooming and centering a photo, is easier with a touch screen.
Even adding just that one thing is worth having a touch screen for.
Another example: working in the iOS simulator is now way easier because you can touch your apps that you're developing for iOS and iPadOS. And, by the way, macOS can run iOS/iPadOS apps directly from the App Store, so if there's something you really want to run that you just can't find a macOS equivalent for, there you go, you can just do it and interact with the app more naturally.
The only touchscreen laptop I ever understood the appeal of was that one Lenovo one where you can fold the bottom back to make it a literal tablet or prop up as a kickstand.
The value of “tablet mode” would mainly be if I want to do content consumption, like watch video or read a book, while on the couch or in bed since it allows a wider range of postures you can sit or lay in when you don’t have to rest it on a flat surface.
If you can’t fold it back I just don’t get the appeal.
The touchscreen laptops I have seen last years are just normal windows laptops that happen to have a touchscreen, which I assume is what you refer to as "half way experience". How are you supposed to use it any differently anyway when you cannot actually turn it into a tablet anyway by separating screen and keyboard? And my impression was not that anybody was unhappy anyway.
I've never hard particularly good experiences with using Windows laptops as tablets, but mostly on account of form factor rather than software.
The sweet spot for me is the iPad mini, but I tend to use tablets as glorified e-readers and video players; the only serious work I do on them is reading.
With that said, I have zero problem with touchscreens or convertable form factors. In fact, I used a Surface Pro for years as my main laptop, and it was one of the best Windows laptops I've used.
But again, I'm not a big fan of mobile devices as primary computing devices unless I'm actually working on the go.
Even for commuting back and forth between an office and a home office, I'd rather just put something along the lines of a Mac Studio in a bag — for a few months last year, it was actually a SFF (not micro, weighed about 10 kg) Dell OptiPlex in an aluminium briefcase, which was fine!
The downgrade to touch is fine for basically everyone. People clutching pearls are simply mostly uninformed or specifically worried about deep edge cases from some stupid mountain of stupid superiority.
"Tablet mode" was not necessary to use for touchscreen, though. As far as I remember you can have full touchscreen functionality in the default mode of windows. I had a surface pro 4 for some years and I do not remember using tablet mode ever.
Windows 8, which was tablet-oriented, was one of these skip generations of windows that nobody cares about in the end, and when the next comes everybody forgets. I never installed it anyway. I have not owned a touchscreen laptop myself since then, but from friends that have and I have used theirs, it is like OP described as a "harmless additional feature/why not", something that just makes certain interactions a bit faster.
But especially on an actual laptop, one that you cannot just separate the screen from the keyboard, stuff like "virtual keyboard" and "tablet mode" matter much less because it is not like you will take it and use it as a pure tablet anyway.
I made this point below, but Windows 10 still doesn't have the display-real-estate efficiency of Windows 7. Windows 10 wastes all kind of screen space on large, flat surfaces that a non-touch-screen user will never use. Windows 7 wasn't as pretty as Windows 10, but it was better at displaying information.
So actually, you are harmed by this decision every day you use a Windows 10/11 laptop. You live with this every day. You just don't know what you're missing.
Windows 10/11 looks almost identical to Windows 7. I really don’t see a major difference.
But even if I accept your premise, I’ll remind you that Windows 7 came out 19 years ago. I didn’t exactly own a 27” 4K monitor in 2009, and a 14” or 16” screen laptop in 2009 would not have been thin and light like it is today. 2009 was like “my bezels are over a half inch wide” era.
The OS is fully scalable as well. You can just make it smaller in a very granular way. Windows 7 wasn’t capable of that.
UI designers think that an interface should look like an art project rather than a tool, and that discoverability and information density are bugs to be squashed.
Let's try to imagine a situation when Win10+ UI has "the same display-real-estate efficiency of Windows 7".
Would it change anyhthing? No. Because developers of the programs what are not part of Windows aren't keen on keeping "the same efficiency". Audacity 4, Thunderbird are good examples of a bad interface - and they did it disregarding the OS UI.
I've been using Thunderbird since I don't even remember when and I never noticed that it's got a bad interface, unless when they broke manually sorting folders and fixed it years later. It's got the UI that a mail client has to have. GMail does have a bad UI. Sometimes I don't understand where a message ends and where a message starts. Luckily I don't have to use it.
They are basically throwing away the existing UI asking with its decades of refinement in favor of something that looks like what you'd get if apple mail and outlook had a disfugured child.
Oh the horror. However Thunderbird 115 was from 2023 (or 2024?) I am on version 159 now and I am still using the old UI. Either the new one is opt in or I opted out of it and forgot about the issue.
> and I never noticed that it's got a bad interface
That's because you are just accustomed to it [0]. If you would have a fresh look on it, especially on a small screen - it would find it atrocious.
There is still a separate SMTP configuration and it's a separate separate SMTP configuration for the each account.
There is absolutely useless left vertical bar which... does nothing what can't be shoved unto the useless, empty top bar. There is useless empty top bar which holds a search box and a hamburger menu.
For the unknown reason[1] this top bar is twice the tall of the regular menu. Oh. There is TWO search boxes[2]. Enabling Quick Filter adds another toolbar instead of using the bar where the button 'Quick Filter' resides.
And if you have multiple accounts and for some reason you can't auth for a moment (eg server problem, not with a connection) you would be spammed with the auth boxes and even if you successfully auth in one - you would still need to cancel or auth in all other what was spammed on you.
There is a lot, a lot of things where TB sucks. You just familiar with it.
[0] and probably configured it years ago and never touched the config too.
[1] actually it to be tall enough to hold hamburger button - because there is an option to add buttons to it. But you can't move buttons from the left useless vertical bar to the top bar. So you can have 'Mail', 'Calendar' etc duplicated on the top bar... for what?
NB yes you can hide the left vertical bar. Hide, not remove. Still it was thought on, implemented and shoved on our asses for absolutely no reason..
Not anymore, a lot of apps (from browsers to the system UI) adapt to whether you have a touch screen and whether you use it. For example, Windows Explorer and Edge (and Chrome) still use (relatively-)compact widgets on touchscreen-less computers.
At 100% scaling with "Compact view" on, Windows 11's File Explorer takes 135 pixels to get from the top of the titlebar to the top of the content. The same dimension in Windows 7 is 92 pixels. That's almost 50% vertical space bloat for no discernible benefit.
unless i misunderstand the implication as to their behavior on touchscreenful computers, this would seem to poorly address the concern upthread of explicitly expecting the touchscreen hardware, and thus the concomitant software annoyances, to become effectively unavoidable
Are you making this point from the context where you’ve never tried a touch screen computer?
This isn’t an unimplemented theory. You can head over to Best Buy right now and see what it’s like to use a touch screen laptop.
I feel like all this debate is taking place in an odd vacuum where a lot of us are talking about a bunch of potential problems with having a touch screen on a computer and all these problems are already resolved.
Maybe it’s similar to the whole iPhone duo thing where Apple users are just discovering all the caveats of a foldable phone, but we’ve already gone over all of it with competitors.
In general the vast majority of folks that make these comments are exactly from that viewpoint. It was a valid concern a decade ago--right now it just makes them uninformed.
> It absolutely is a harmless feature that you can ignore. There’s no reason not to have one
what i've learning developing and creating products over the years is that harmless features tend to be the ones that cause the most problems. for ex, now you have to add touchscreen code to the OS vs previously not having it at all. and this code or feature we will support for the rest of the lifetime of that product.
You make a good point. Windows 10 course corrected fairly heavily from Windows 8. The tablet mode was there but you could ignore it pretty easily.
However, I still feel like Apple is in their Microsoft era where they're making some of the same mistakes Microsoft have made in the past 20 years.
Aero -> Liquid Glass
Ads in the OS -> Ads in core applications
Fullscreen ads for Microsoft services in the OS -> banner ads for Apple services in the OS
Dark patterns for Windows 11 upgrades -> Dark patterns for macOS 26 upgrades
Windows Mixed Reality -> Vision Pro
I could also say Surface Duo -> iPhone Duo but at this time it's too early to tell. I also think that a touchscreen Mac is a mistake. Not because it's something Microsoft already did but because the reason a MacBook does not need a touchscreen is because Apple has best-in-class trackpads.
The UI isn't worse though, it's literally the same. It's just an additional option you have to be able to touch the screen. I routinely forget that my Framework 13 Pro even has a touch screen. I don't really care that it does because that functionality of the computer cost a single digit amount of dollars to include in the design.
I'll list out two immediate benefits with zero UI changes that macOS touch screen users will get:
iOS developers will be able to touch their apps in the simulator.
Pinch/zoom/centering photos will be highly intuitive for basically everyone because basically everyone has family photos and a photo library.
There's nothing expensive about touch screens. They are nearly free to include in a bulk custom laptop panel design.
Go over to the Lenovo/Dell/HP website and you'll see that they offer a touch screen option for something like $50 and you can just choose whether you have it or not.
Go buy a $450 iPad from Apple and it has a touch screen. That's cheaper than any Mac on sale.
Hey, that's another great point, maybe Apple's laptops could be more customizable and modular, wouldn't that be nice?
Same goes for Linux. My CachyOS install on my Framework 13 Pro has a touch screen. There’s literally no downside for me having it. I don’t have to use it if I don’t want to. But if I want to scroll a website or scrub a video the option is there.