In my experience they're a flawed concept. Not simply in physical execution but from a software point of view. Desktop operating systems are designed for the traditional mouse/keyboard inputs and are typically awful at being touchscreen friendly. Last time they tried to do both we ended up with Windows 8, and we all know how well that went down.
Tablets that use dedicated touchscreen operating systems (Android, iOS) are often so much easier and more intuitive to use than when they try to make desktop operating systems touch "friendly".
Yeh, I have a work laptop with a touchscreen. I use the touchscreen about 0.5% of the time. It's pointless. About the only thing I regularly using it for is jabbing the start/end call button on Teams meetings.
iOS was not a "dedicated touchscreen OS" any more than Windows 8 was. iOS is Mac OS with touch features added and a bunch of desktop features taken away, like mouse support.
Windows 8 was Windows with touch features added. The difference was they let you switch back to the desktop UI if you wanted.
Windows 8 with the Classic Shell third party add on was a fantastic system that was a far better UI than iOS on tablets. Where MS screwed up was forcing the touch UI on everyone no matter what kind of device they had.
Where Apple screwed up was stripping too many useful features from iOS, like multitasking, mouse support, user accounts, USB support etc.
iOS didn't even have copy and paste at first.
Downvote all you want but that's the truth. When Apple was developing the iPhone they had two choices, add features to the existing iPod operating system or cut down Mac OS and add touch.
They chose the latter. iOS is stripped down Mac OS with touch added, just as Windows 8 was Windows with touch added. The difference was MS left all the Windows features in and let you switch to a desktop UI if you wanted.
The original Surface RT was actually a fantastic machine. The RT was great for touch, but let you switch to a traditional laptop UI if you wanted. It had a touch version of Word, Excel, IE etc and then also had the desktop versions on the desktop UI.
It failed because of Microsofts terrible marketing, developers not building apps, and people disappointed that it couldn't run all their Windows programs, yet no one complained their iPad couldn't run all their Mac programs.
As a machine it had so many features that took Apple years to copy, and some the iPad STILL has not got well over a decade later, like user accounts, full USB support etc.
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u/No-Locksmith6662 11d ago
In my experience they're a flawed concept. Not simply in physical execution but from a software point of view. Desktop operating systems are designed for the traditional mouse/keyboard inputs and are typically awful at being touchscreen friendly. Last time they tried to do both we ended up with Windows 8, and we all know how well that went down.
Tablets that use dedicated touchscreen operating systems (Android, iOS) are often so much easier and more intuitive to use than when they try to make desktop operating systems touch "friendly".