Submitted by “Efforts are split between models in which keyboards detach from screens, ones in which the keys remain attached but can be hidden behind displays, and traditional fixed clamshell designs.” None of these really float my boat. They work with clunky connectors and weird hinges, while I’d much rather have Surface’s nice magnetic connection. On top of that, Surface just looks way better than this stuff. Pretty clear why Microsoft felt the need to make their own hardware.
Am I the only one who just wants an ultrabook with a capacitive touch screen?
Not at all.
I would love one of those, given that it had a capable CPU, reasonable GPU, >=8GB of ram, an SSD (>=256GB), and double HD resolution.
I’d be very happy to pay 4K or so for that.
I’d settle for a monitor with more than HD resolution, and capacitive touch, though. It beats me why nobody is doing that. I’d love one at my desk.
Most people don’t have $4K of disposable income laying around, and that price range isn’t attractive at all to the average user.
Anyways, if there were a big enough market for it I’m sure they would make them. There’s no point bothering with little to no ROI.
Probably because most users don’t fancy the idea of getting RSI.
Touch interfaces make a great idea for portable devices you can rest on your lap, or in kiosks. But for day to day use on a large(ish) monitor, keyboards and mice make far better ergonomics, are cheaper and more accurate.
No, you are not the only one.
I would have been a big fan of the original touchscreen tablets with integrated swivel keyboard. I longed for one entering college and the fact that it could function as both a tablet and laptop without crippling laptop functionality was awesome. But cost had always been the biggest detractor for me and probably millions of other technology seekers. If only they had been cheaper, it would have been enough to build up a healthy ecosystem back then.
Today’s tablets have become affordable, which made them popular enough to build sustainable ecosystems. So I am pleased to finally have them, unfortunately though they often don’t cut the mustard as a primary computing device – most modern tablet owners will still need access to another PC.
Edited 2012-09-03 02:45 UTC
Unless it is a 10″ netbook-like device you would likely find a touch screen very uncomfortable to use. It’s simply too far, too big and too high to use (just pretend you already have it and try to “use” it).
I have a Wacom tablet. It has its own issues (like a mouse, it’s detached from the screen, which feels unnatural at first) but at least it is ergonomic. It lays horizontally on my desk, next to the keyboard, and it has higher dpi than the screen so I don’t have to wave my hand as much as with a touch screen.
Touch screens work very well if you can hold them in your hands or place them where you normally place a keyboard. Even this assumes that the interface is designed for minimizing user interaction (occasional touches or drags but without the whole WIMP overhead).
ndrw,
“Touch screens work very well if you can hold them in your hands or place them where you normally place a keyboard.”
That’s actually why I like a tablet where the keyboard can fold out of the way. While interacting with the desktop via a touch screen should be possible, that’s not exactly what I personally have in mind, which are more application specific use cases. I like to see applications where touch input can enhance a traditional paper notebook, instead of enhance the WIMP desktop to use touch everywhere.
Some examples:
For note-taking, even a simple paper notebook can rival a keyboard/mouse laptop because it is much easier to sketch out quick diagrams the “old fashioned” way. To this day, I sometimes prefer to draw things on paper and scan them in than try to enter them using a mouse.
Keyboard calculators (such as bccalc) are great but they suck at visually representing formulas. With a touch screen I had envisioned a stylus input algebraic calculator where one could write math formulas (symbolically as mathematicians intended) and the software could solve them on “paper” in a different color. It could also warn of logical inconsistencies in your note’s equations or “scratch paper”. It could annotate spelling corrections in the same way.
There is no reason that laptops should not also be able to do these things.
“(occasional touches or drags but without the whole WIMP overhead).”
I prefer not to have the OS exclude WIMP entirely. The exact same motivation for having multi-window to display documents simultaneously on the desktop will re-emerge on tablets – touch input has absolutely nothing to do with it. In a classroom setting I can read a book, a handout, and write in my notepad at the same time. In principal I’d like to produce the same experience on a sufficiently sized tablet. (Hint: I shouldn’t need to have multiple tablets running to view multiple things at once)
I see how this could be useful and I agree with you on principle.
It is just that adding a full-fledged input device and using it only as a secondary input method isn’t going to be particularly efficient (cost, power, weight, image quality etc). If I had one, I’d like to make a better use of it.
BTW, most of your use cases would be served rather well by replacing a touchpad in your laptop with an inductive tablet sensor. We could go further and make the whole keyboard one big touchpad/tablet (I wonder if that’s what Touch Cover in Microsoft’s Surface is going to be).
ndrw,
“It is just that adding a full-fledged input device and using it only as a secondary input method isn’t going to be particularly efficient (cost, power, weight, image quality etc). If I had one, I’d like to make a better use of it.”
I doubt many laptop users would mind the addition of touch support (as long as the addition doesn’t compromise the laptop’s existing functionality). It’s the inverse that isn’t necessarily true – many modern tablet users would rather not have a keyboard (but then they’re not the audience I’m talking about).
“BTW, most of your use cases would be served rather well by replacing a touchpad in your laptop with an inductive tablet sensor.”
Would it be a display? It’s not practical to write/edit on a touch pad if there isn’t feedback.
“We could go further and make the whole keyboard one big touchpad/tablet (I wonder if that’s what Touch Cover in Microsoft’s Surface is going to be).”
I’ve seen demos of this on youtube actually. It has merit in that it frees the main screen from having to display a virtual keyboard. But until virtual keyboards gain tactile feedback, they won’t replace physical keyboards in my opinion.
I think you might be interested in microsoft’s courier tablet project which they killed a few years ago.
http://www.machackpc.com/microsoft-courier-details-are-revealed-int…
The reason why all of these models are showing up that are a mix between a traditional PC and a tablet are because Windows 8 is broken from a design standpoint.
You can’t make a great piece of hardware when the operating system it is meant to run is crap and the developers themselves do not know WTF it is supposed to be!
Is it a PC? Yes. Is it a Tablet OS? YES! Is it a frankenstein joke? Oh YES INDEED.
For the first time ever I have zero interest in the latest version of windows.
Sad but true. Windows 8 absolutely sucks a big one with a traditional keyboard-and-mouse setup, and I would imagine it would be even worse with a typical laptop trackpad-and-keyboard interface, so everyone is busy trying to fling shit at the fan to see what sticks and doesn’t come back to splash right back in their faces. This is not innovation; this is companies desperately trying to make something work that just doesn’t, and it will probably never work as well as a traditional desktop for anyone who needs real power, no matter how much you try to change and mangle the physical interface in an attempt to try to make it fit.
For a company that spent so much money on R&D to come up with a GUI that, for the most part, is extremely easy to figure out and understand even for an idiot and complete newcomer to computers, it is amazing that they allowed this garbage to get to the heads of their upper management and start forcing this crap down millions of computer users’ throats. This is a pure marketing gimmick–it only has the potential (key word there) to benefit a small group of users that buy a specialty/mobile form factor touchscreen device. To everyone else, it’s a big flip of the bird.
It might be causing some very short-term innovation between companies right now, specifically for mobile touchscreen-based devices, but as I see it in the long term we all lose. Anyone who wants real power, at least. Windows 8–just like Windows Vista and ME before it–is a disgrace.
Edited 2012-09-03 06:37 UTC
The reason how this got past usability testing is simple friend…the X86 PC is flatline and frankly its gonna STAY flatline because once we hit multicores PCs went way past good enough and are into insanely overpowered. This means that the PC will be like a washer and dryer, only replaced when it dies.
Meanwhile the ARM tablet is undergoing its own MHz race just as PCs did in the 90s and MSFT has pretty much ZERO percentage of that market, same goes for ARM cellphones. So Ballmer is throwing the Hail Mary and praying to every Deity in the book that he can gain some share.
Whether it will work or not I guess will depend on how much money Ballmer is willing to flush, if he sells iPad specced hardware at Kindle prices? he might be able to buy some share and hope it gets made up on the appstore. I think it will bomb on the X86 though, most likely it’ll be like Vista where the OEMs offer you a “Windows 8 system” with Win 7 and a DVD in the bottom of the box nobody uses.
But I do feel sorry for the OEMs though, knowing just like Vista MSFT won’t let them sell Win 7 PCs until the sales take a dive like with Vista and in a bad economy having 6 months of no sales is gonna seriously hurt.
The difference is, a quality washer or dryer can potentially last at least 15-20 years or longer with maintenance. Windows, the operating system almost exclusively sold with PCs, typically gets infections galore and eventually takes a shit within maybe 3-5 years (and I’m being generous). Quite often, people think the PC is then junk, and that it’s either not worth the time, trouble and money repairing, or just not possible. And then there are those people who have become pissed off with their entire computer over how badly Windows is running, they give up on the whole machine, and even if they’re told it could be fixed they’d rather just trash it and get a new one.
I’ve used a 2001 Gateway with a 1.7GHz P4 and only 256MB RAM (RD-RAM–rare, expensive and not worth the price to upgrade) for over a decade before giving up on it, but trust me, that thing could be a supercomputer running Windows out of the box and many people would get rid of it for something new after once or twice getting infected, and experiencing the poor performance, pop-ups, errors and blue screens.
Also, I wouldn’t say that computers are “insanely overpowered.” With all the bloated operating systems being released these days under the assumption that the user will have a fast processor, loads of RAM, and even hardware accelerated, power is just as important as it’s always been if you care about performance. It’s just that these days, you don’t have to think as hard or spend as much money to get something decent. You don’t really think hardware is getting many times faster while software remains exactly the same in terms of speed and efficiency, do you?
Friend the PCs I was selling 5 years ago were Phenom I X4s and Core Duos with 4Gb of RAM. Tell me what could you not run easily on that? Heck i have businesses on Phenom X2s and Core Duos and they are quite happy and have no intention of replacing anytime soon.
And all it takes to keep a machine clean since Vista is any of the good free AVs and a teeny tiny bit of common sense. It usually takes me less than 30 minutes to teach a customer on Win 7 everything they need to know to keep the system clean.
And sorry you got stuck with RDRAM but I saw the writing on the wall and avoided that garbage. I’ve also made sure my systems for the last 7 years can hold at least 4Gb of RAM and with any multicore that is more than enough to run anything the average user wants to use.
Oh and I know all about old gear, I use a Sempron 1.8GHz from 2004 as a nettop in my shop, with 2Gb of RAM and XP it surfs just fine. Already have 7 in a dual boot and it runs just fine on that system OOTB, it even has Aero since I added an old Geforce card I had laying around.
I don’t recall saying that there are things you “can not” run on older hardware. Just that while hardware power is increasing, so is software bloat, so you often you won’t be able to run newer versions of the same programs on the same aging hardware at the same exact speed. They’ll begin slowing down as they get more bloated with bad code and start sucking up more memory. Throwing faster hardware and more memory at it is not exactly the optimal way to solve this problem, but, it’s basically what everyone’s doing instead of writing their programs more efficiently.
Citation please? Name a single program, just one mind you, that won’t run on a Phenom I X4 with 4Gb of RAM? That was actually one of my cheaper builds I sold thanks to the TLB bug I was getting Phenom I X4s dirt cheap so i was selling fully loaded units less than $425 which I’m sure you’ll agree is pretty dang cheap for a custom build fully loaded with OS and software.
So I’m sorry but what you are saying was true…in 2004 when the MHz race was still on, but I’m just not seeing that now. I even have a shop running Solidworks and Photoshop on Phenom I X3s and they are quite happy with the performance, they simply added 1Gb GPUs to take over the rendering of the SW objects (which BTW were a grand total of $27 a piece) and they can spin and resize those parts as fast as their mice can whip them around.
So I stand by my statement, once we reached multicores PCs became insanely overpowered for what the masses are doing with the things. The only thing I’ve seen come even close to what you are talking about is FPS gaming, and even then a 3GHz Athlon X4 from 4 years ago will chew through every game out there with a decent GPU at over 30 FPS, no problem.
Well, that’s the cool thing about Windows 8… if you need ‘real power’, just press Win+D, and you’re off to the races
Of course, most people (probably 90% of them), don’t need all those bells and whistles, so Metro will probably do fine for them, which is what MS is counting on. Of course, I have no idea if tech tards will take to Metro or not… only time will tell. Sure it’s different, but then so was iOS and Android.
As for Windows 8 ‘classic’ desktop, it’s got some features that Win7 doesn’t, such as native USB 3.0 support, taskbars on multiple monitors, hyper-v virtualization, improved task manager, native ISO mounting, etc. Plus, it runs faster and on less memory. It’s not a huge improvement, but for $40, I plan on taking the plunge.
Edited 2012-09-03 16:26 UTC
Use it while you still can, because it’s clear Microsoft has every intention to eradicate the traditional desktop from Windows as “obsolete” technology as soon as they can. The whole desktop will soon enough go the way of the classic Start menu. You know, when the menu was actually still there, and back before they made it all fancy with two panes and a user picture (IMO, a major step down, introduced in XP and forced onto users in Vista).
iOS and Android may have been different, but they weren’t attempted to be be forced on traditional mouse/trackpad and keyboards-based desktop and laptop machines. They were specifically designed for and installed on portable devices with a touchscreen, like phones and tablet computers. Big difference there, because Microsoft is creating a Frankenstein monster with (for now) two completely different graphical user interfaces that have no resemblance to each other, either in appearance, usage, or even intended devices to be used on.
It’s what Microsoft should have released separately as “Windows 8 Tablet and Phone Edition” or something.
‘As soon as they can’ is the key here, and will probably be like in Windows 12
They’re not going to be able to turn it off until Metro gets mature enough to the point where they can port fully-functional versions of Office and Visual Studio to it. And if you don’t think Metro will ever get mature enough for that, go back and take a look at Windows 1.0; that’s essentially the foundation that Windows 7 was built on. Already, it has several features that the classic desktop does not.
So, relax guys. You’re not going to install Windows 9 and suddenly discover that the traditional desktop is gone, and it’s all Metro. I think the point here is to try and get tech tards moved over, and then migrate the power users at a later time. And in the unlikely event that the traditional desktop does go away in Windows 9, it’s going to go away whether I use it Windows 7 or Windows 8.
It’s also possible that if Metro doesn’t catch on with the computer illiterate, MS will abandon it, just like they have done with other technologies that they ‘bet the company’ on.
Edited 2012-09-03 23:31 UTC
You don’t get the idea that with every version of Windows that Microsoft is forced by the opposition to leave the desktop in, that Microsoft will make it increasingly difficult and just a massive pain in the ass to use the traditional desktop without throwing hurdles at you?
Seriously, come on–they’ve done such things already with Windows 8 in its development cycle, and the damn thing is not even released yet…
Yes, but I also get the idea that Metro is going to get better over time, and not the clusterf**k that it is now.
What did you like about win98SE winME winXP-SP0 and Vista-SP0 that you were interested in?
98SE I was interested in running a newer version of DirectX that required it (can’t remember which ver, I think 7 or 8)
WinME I skipped I was already on Windows 2000 but I was interested in the changes and it was the last of the Win9X series.
Windows XP I was excited about a single OS for consumer and pros built on the NT kernel
Vista I was excited about Aero and a load of other changes. Yes it was a let down. Windows 7 redeemed my feelings on it.
But DirectX 11.1, USB3.0, less memory usage, improved performance, better file management, better task manager, combined phone/tablet/desktop OS, Metro, HTML5 apps aren’t up to par to that?
I’m not to one you were responding to, but those are two easy answers.
1. Windows 98 was Win9x refined, done right, with more hardware drivers and stability without adding too much bloat. It was just a good Windows release for the time, and an improvement over its predecessors. Simple as that.
2. Ever use Windows ME? I was unfortunate at the time to buy a PC at the time, and it came with that version of the OS pre-installed. After you’ve used that incredibly bloated, slow, unstable disaster for a few weeks (let alone months), you’ll be begging for a change. Hell, I even paid for a damn XP “preview” release and then immediately went out and bought an upgrade license when it was finally released–Windows ME was just that bad. It was slow and all it could do well is crash.
I agree. That is why I said Win98SE.
I summed up the windows releases that I thought were pretty bad or boring.
Most people don’t know this, but the reason WiME was a nightmare was they were in the middle of switching from the 9X VXD driver model to WDM and some idiot in MSFT thought it’d get more people on board if you could use the old VXD drivers as well as WDM.
If you had a machine that ONLY had WDM drivers? It was actually more stable than Win9X and ran quite well. If you had a system with ONLY VXD drivers? Then it was no better or worse than Win98SE. If you were like the majority and got an OEM that had a mix of WDM and VXD drivers? Welcome to the good ship crashalot, hope you weren’t expecting to actually use the system for anything.
It would be cool to have a tablet with a tablet OS, dock it and it switches to a traditional OS.
But I guess it won’t be very practical for programmers, basically having to create 2 quite different GUIs. Then again it’s not that unrealistic.
But that’s the only reasonable way to do it.
Besides the types of apps functional on tables (content consuption) and on desktop (content creation) rarely overlap.
Yes, it’s true tablets and desktops each have their strengths. But if you had a dock/undock-switch-OS system you can optimize your computer for either.
Create stuff in docked mode, undock it and be more mobile.
I guess you can even take it a step further, a laptop kind of dock and a full desktop dock. If each is sold separately you can buy what you want and thus only pay for what you need.
Then again you’d probably end up with a laptop that isn’t as good as a real laptop and a desktop that isn’t as good as a real desktop. Maybe the tablet can be some good though.