Weekly poll: do touchscreens on laptops make sense?

“We’ve done tons of user testing on this and it turns out it doesn’t work. Touch surfaces don’t want to be vertical. It gives a great demo, but after a short period of time you start to fatigue and after an extended period of time, your arm wants to fall off. It doesn’t work. It’s ergonomically terrible.”

This is what Steve Jobs said about laptops with touchscreens back in 2010 – it’s hardly a new idea, but sixteen years later Apple announced its first such laptops, the MacBook Pros with PROLED XDR displays. Do you agree with Jobs or do you think that Ternus & co. are right?

Of course, it’s not just Apple – some Microsoft Surface laptops have touchscreens (to say nothing of the Surface tablets), many Windows on ARM laptops do too (who here remembers the whole Windows 8 mess?) as do many x86 laptops.

Do touchscreens on laptops make sense?

John Ternus was appointed Vice President of Hardware Engineering back in 2012 and later oversaw the Intel to Apple silicon transition for Macs. The new MacBooks may have been designed before Ternus took over as CEO from Tim Cook, but his hands are all over the new OLED-based touchscreens – literally and figuratively.

Was Jobs right – are touchscreens on laptops “ergonomically terrible”? Or maybe they only make sense on laptops with 360° hinges (which the MacBooks don’t have) or 2-in-1 convertibles (tablets with keyboard docks), basically laptops that convert into tablet mode – what do you think?