this post was submitted on 16 Aug 2025
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Frankly, I’ve never got the touchscreen laptop thing. I got given one by my high school years ago. Used it for over a year. Fucking never used the touch screen functionality, I tried using it to draw with a couple times and it was just a worse experience than using the Wacom tablet I already had.
Like someone must like them, people keep asking other companies to include them in their laptop. But I’ve never seen a reason to want a touch screen in a laptop, and only ever been annoyed with it when I got one.
I actually like the touchscreen, but it's best on a more tablet style like a surface than a traditional laptop. It gives me the option to use it as a touch movie or music player or better yet, a silent way to use audio recording software. Nothing sucks on a track like mouse clicks and keyboard keys.
I actually had a gen 1 surface in high school. I despised it. It had the worst keyboard I’ve ever used, like, it had to be flat on a hard surface. If I tried typing with it on my lap, the keyboard would flex and hit random keys or click the mouse, jumping me half way across a document or opening something.
I imagine they’ve gotten better about the keyboard since then, but still, it was a genuinely awful design.
As for recording, I usually just use key binds, and my keyboard is pretty silent so I don’t tend to get that picked up by the microphone (I have an external mic that’s somewhat directional so that helps also). I imagine it would be really bad with a mechanical keyboard, but, I don’t really care for them, so never been an issue.
I used tablet mode of my laptops a lot, but having e-inks books too, I find that's a touchscreen could've been replaced with a couple of buttons they had for switching pages (and maybe a touchpad too?).
Like, the most I wanted from tablet mode is reading internet pages, scrolling them and tapping links. Rarely I needed any input from the virtual keyboard or random taps somewhere. Some simple controls could do the trick without pretending it can draw stuff like a real tablet.
They’re great when you’re busy ‘moving around’ your device, like when doing stuff around the house, and you need to return to the desktop and just click a simple thing but don’t know where the cursor is. Also good for circling and drawing on screenshots.
I just use my phone when I’m moving around a lot. and I don’t tend to mark up screenshots often enough for that to necessitate a major design feature of my computer.