"Surprisingly, touchscreen laptops don't suck"
I laughed when I read this headline, and I have to agree.
With Windows 8, touchscreens are more relevant than ever before. However, some pundits have long believed that a touchscreen simply doesn't belong on a laptop. Sometimes, they quote Steve Jobs. "Touch surfaces don't want to be vertical." That's Jobs in 2010, telling the world why Apple notebooks wouldn't feature the technology.
"You can converge a toaster and a refrigerator, but those things are probably not gonna be pleasing to the user." That one's from Tim Cook earlier this year, explaining the company's stance on convertible tablet PCs.
These were the opinions of the leaders of the most profitable tech company in the world. I believed them myself. And yet somehow, neither of them have kept me from instinctively, repeatedly touching the screen of my MacBook Air this month.
I review laptops for The Verge, and recently I've been using a string of Windows 8 touchscreen computers. I was prepared for disappointment from day one — prepared to say that while certain Windows 8 gestures are easier with a touchscreen, the overall idea isn't very good. I was prepared to write that the Windows 8 interface was forcing unnecessary touchscreen controls on people who wouldn't appreciate them, particularly if they were simply grafted onto a traditional laptop.
But the more I've used Windows 8, despite its faults, the more I've become convinced that touchscreens are the future — even vertical ones.
This morning I gave a group presentation in front of my class titled, "Tap vs Click: Comparing the efficiency and costs/benefits of digital and physical interfaces". Over the past few weeks we've been reading research paper upon research paper comparing touchscreens and the mouse, and we ultimately came to the same conclusion Sean did:
We've been looking at this all wrong. A touchscreen isn't a replacement for a keyboard or mouse, it's a complement.
In the same way the mouse didn't fully replace the keyboard (for obvious reasons), touch displays aren't going to fully replace the mouse/trackpad either. There's a lot to love about the mouse cursor's accuracy and precision, and although touch is lowering the complexity of everyday computing to an unprecedented level, it's not that great in multi-window Desktop environments. Touch isn't the end-all-be-all computer interface - it just enables some really nice things we've never had before. Gestures like pinch-to-zoom or pull-to-refresh, for example, make doing certain things more enjoyable and, well, kinda fun - something that can't be said very often of the mouse or keyboard.
People didn't like the mouse, either
Here's an old usability video of a person using a mouse with Windows '95 (from Building Windows 8), notice how much trouble he has with double-clicking. Compare that to the 2-year-olds who use iPads today.
While we were putting together our presentation, we came across a quote from John C. Dvorak back from the 1980's - a time when the keyboard (and its hundreds of shortcuts) was king and the mouse was unwelcome:
Apple makes the arrogant assumption of thinking that it knows what you want and need. It, unfortunately, leaves the “why” out of the equation — as in “why would I want this?” The Macintosh uses an experimental pointing device called a “mouse”. There is no evidence that people want to use these things.
I don't want to single out Dvorak here - this seemed to be the general sentiment back in the day. Obviously people ended up accepting the mouse, but not because it could do anything more quickly/efficiently than the keyboard; it was the combination of an understandable GUI with folders and clickable icons that eventually made computing more enjoyable and accessible.
Now, in the new age of touchable operating systems like iOS, Android and Windows 8, we're seeing yet another shift in the way computers look and feel, and we're hearing a lot of the same kinds of criticism. With all of the above in mind, maybe it's time to argue less about which input method is a half-second faster than the other and accept that people will end up doing whatever feels right to them in the situation they're in. Don't bother arguing with a person who prefers to tap on their laptop's screen to switch apps instead of using the trackpad - you're going to look like a mouse-hating keyboard enthusiast from the 1980's.
Want to fly around New York City? Pinch-to-zoom on a touchscreen is fantastic for that. Need to crank out a term paper or edit something in Photoshop? Turn on your wireless mouse and keyboard and get started.
Nothing is getting killed or replaced in the near future - we're just enthusiastically exploring the capabilities of the newest member in the input method family.