I had several PCs with touch screen and this absolutely true. Even intermittent use is not something I did, it’s just too inconvenient to ever become a habit, so the few times it’d be great, I don’t think about it being there because it’s not in my active list of affordances.

I wonder what people will say when Apple releases the touch screen MacBook later this year then.

Nobody forces you to use touchscreen exclusively?

Yeah, but this was also strategically in Apple's interest to sell the iPads with nerfed up iPad OS as a separate line up. I love Steve Jobs and all, but this did NOT age well. The millions of people using Surface and Surface Pro will absolutely disagree with this take.

I feel like the point isn't "there should be a touch screen MacBook" but more "holy shit we simulated a working touch screen by looking at reflections coming off the glass, isn't that cool".

I don’t understand touchscreens on laptops that aren’t designed to fold flat. It’s got the feel of finger painting an unconstrained birthday balloon.

Sometimes, if I’ve been using my iPad for awhile and switch over to my MBP, I might reach out and touch the screen out of habit. I can’t be the only one.

While I'm the same and totally agree with you, the few times I've been using touchscreen I find the habit sticks so hard that for days I keep touching my macbook screen, so there is definitely some subconscious desire for this (or I would have defaulted to using the trackpad even if my brain thought touch was available)

> I don't get why Apple are apparently going to be putting them into the new MBP line later this year.

Apple has apparently being going to put a touchscreen in a laptop every year since the iPad came out, and it's never materialized.

Macs are definitely not optimized for keyboard commands. If you feel the software you use is keyboard optimized, odds are it's not really Mac software.

It just feels ancient and weird now that I can tap every screen I own, except my Mac. I don't want to replace the Mac's keyboard & mouse with a touchscreen, I would simply like it to support touch.

(This also made me realize the impending obsolescence of the Studio Monitor XDR: no touch support.)

Sometimes I feel the urge to do some art, and the bigger surface might allow that. Perhaps in lieu, make a bigger trackpad.

Why? Better than a track pad.

Use a Surface Pro some time. If you are just casually browsing or reading a website. I find it much nicer to just tap on a link or swipe to scroll.

I have 2-3 old touchscreen laptops lying around. The touchscreen is useless to me. Worse than useless. If I ever use it, it’s accidentally, and I end up annoyed.

I very much would want a touchscreen for my use cases.

I wouldn't want a touch screen to become the primary input device, but I think it would be useful on occasion. Not entirely unlike how we still have touchpads even though we try to use keyboard commands.

It would make sense if the screen folded over. In a laptop form factor a touch screen is just annoying because it keeps pushing the screen back.

Yes, I feel like it'll be a degrade in quality if they do this with any of their current line up. If they want to make a Macbook Ultra or whatever with it, that's fine -- I would have no interest in it.

The benefit of a touchscreen MBP is that Apple will be forced to make their screens more protective.

as long as it works well, would rather have it than not (but don't want to pay extra, so yeah... leave it out)

I agree. I've never wanted a touch screen on my laptop. My screen gets smudged enough already.

The ergonomic aspects are horrible. I believe there's actual research on this from the 70s/80s/90s.

All my Windows laptops have touch screens and I love it. What is the problem with having another input method available? You only use it when it’s appropriate.

It's actually quite pleasant user experience for scrolling. Some interactions are better with a pointer, others are better with touch.

You can try it on an iPad with Magic Keyboard attached, it's very good to be able to do precision through the trackpad and then casually move large things on the screen with your fingers.

You don't have to use it.

Difficult to capture reflections across a large screen while also dealing with outdoor lighting, glare, and moisture. The touchscreen part isn't usually what makes outdoor signage expensive compared to IP65, temperature control, and a secure housing, all of which would still need to apply here.

This looks like a neat option for retrofitting, and I suspect it'd work for some non-screen glass applications too. A combined IR/visible light solution would be interesting too, since I suspect those are complimentary (IR touch has issues with radiant light, while this wouldn't; this would have issues with low/no light, while IR wouldn't).

I don’t want to encourage people touch my screen and smudge things up.

Internal with a small mirror

Oleophobic coating is standard on phones and tablets, which is part of why they don’t pick up fingerprints as easily.

Some brands offer coating you can DIY yourself (eg ProofTech OLEOPEL) but these seem mostly designed for phone screens. I don’t know whether they’d be as effective on laptop screens

You could still use the keyboard and track pad

You chose to suffer not just with touchscreens. That said, it would probably work just fine.

I was working on AI in 2018 too :)

At that time, I was quite interested in adversarial examples and ML security.

> why would I ever choose to put fingers on that beautful screen ... I don't get it!

I'm not sure, but bare in mind that the iPad is almost as large of a market as the Mac at this point, and the iPhone has long surpassed Mac revenue. Touching your computer is a very popular sentiment among the grimy-handed public.

i used to have a bad touch screen laptop like 7 years ago and back then it made the mobile development more pleasant (both native and web based)

So you mean they're developing the iPad, an insanely popular device, and you're not sure why they would make such a device?