Asus replaced the touchpad on its new ZenBook Pro with a 5.5-inch touchscreen

What makes this totally different from the touch bar is with the touch bar, you have to wait for developers to add support in their products (or as a dev, write your own tooling). Apple has the muscle to simply make everyone support their crappy bar.

The ZenBook screen is usable right away by anybody. You can just drag any window there. It can be your Steam chat while playing a game, it can be a browser with a Twitch stream or soccer game running in the background while your program, it can be your color pallet for Resolve while editing video ...

It can be used for a lot of things the end user can take advantage of immediately without waiting for a developer to make explicit use of it.

I wonder if it will work on Linux.

In any case, far better than removing a set of useful keys from the top of a physical keyboard.

Add: this also enables new types of casual games, similar to Wordament, Angry Birds etc. Oh, and better smudge tools on Photoshop.

[0]: https://www.asus.com/Project-Precog/

1. It will require a lot of developer effort and testing on this specific device. I regard this as a move in the bad direction: Computer interfaces should be more unified, not less.

2. You're giving the touchpad two functions which are not compatible (and the second function is not necessary: we already have a screen!). If you're happily clicking your way through stuff and some menu suddenly shows up, you will click a bunch of random stuff.

I got one for my girlfriend and another one for my dad, around the same time one of my dev friends also decided to move to ZenBook from rMBP.

Compared to Macbooks it looks, feels and works cheap (the trackpad, d'oh), but that's not the major issue as almost everything is that way excepting Surafaces/XPSes.

But the real issue here is this: hinges. They're horrible. They break every 2 to 9 months. Their quality is also very easy to test - just open any ZenBook in shop and wobble it. Macbook's screen is as solid as rock, won't move an ich, while ZenBooks one - well, it wobbles. Almost unusable on the bus for example, your screen will shake as hell on even smallest bump or corner. And then the hinges will break and Asus will replace them for you. And the new ones will last a year, if you're lucky. Then it happens again and again and all of sudden you're out of warranty and at this point, after replacing hinges for a few times, you're told that they'd gladly replace them for you - and it costs only around $400, while you paid for your ZenBoook $1000, two years ago. %#$# them.

And I wasn't unlucky, this is considered normal for Asus:

http://www.breadcrumbsguide.com/asus-zenbook-review/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EAP-NwyE4H4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ju1aCd4iOo

etc.

Terrible, terrible build quality and no respect for consumers, don't even go near them.

I’m not big fan of the touch bar either, but to state an opinion as fact is just bad journalism.

If they fixed that, there'd still be the issue of usability & utility. This doesn't seem like a complementary feature, it seems like two separate devices bolted together that require heavy context shifting (e.g. if the music card is up, you can't just use the trackpad to access something else on your computer). As implemented it seems like yet another electronics company gimmick like 3d TVs - made because its easy to build, not because the feature offers enough utility to justify its complexity.

That said, I hold out hope for a lay-flat dual-display clamshell with proper haptics and that re-thinks the entire input UI around that paradigm.

I could buy this laptop only for that, even if with Linux I'll probably have to wait the next laptop before the touchscreen is of any use. But no, the RAM is capped at 16 GB and I'm using 32 GB on my HP laptop (several projects for several customers, each one with a different language and environment.)

However my 15" laptop has a useless (for me) number pad with the result that I have to shift it half to the right to be able to keep my hands in front of me and not skewed to the left, which would probably do nasty things to all my upper body. This is the norm for all 15" laptops and I wonder if their designers stopped at the cover page of Norman's "The Design of Everyday Things", with the famous teapot for masochists, and deluded themselves into believing that this is the right way to build stuff.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Design-Everyday-Things-Donald-Norman/...

Around the 5:50 mark: "Obviously you could watch movies and stuff on this [the touchpad screen]."

Who writes this stuff.

i am sure the next step, someone will replace the physical keyboard, with full size touch screen and software keyboard

and future laptops will come with two screens and no keyboard ... and they will be like tablets with double screen,

and then someone will sell a physical keyboard accessory to the two screen laptop

and .. it will be very confusing

It seems to support acting as a second display so I'm feeling optimistic about Linux.

Putting buttons on a touchpad is not the best idea because they would interfere with its normal usage.

And by the way, why nobody makes separate keys for layout switching? It is very inconvenient to have a single key to switch layouts (like Win + Space that is the default for Gnome). It would be much better to have separate physical keys for each language so I can start typing with one of them and never type in the wrong layout.

Seriously, why didn't anyone invented it yet?

(Although the digits used are different. When in landscape, my fingers cradle a phone at a 45-60 degree angle with both thumbs used for input. On a horizontal touchpad the index finger(s) are doing much of the input)

https://imgur.com/SkQgMOU

Wasn't the whole point of AMP to stop this crap?

I don’t know how to explain this, but I just no longer feels the need to press an esc key, and no more tapping for adjusting volume/brightness. I can also adjust font size or color in Words using the touchbar. My I can choose an emjoi in hipchat client using touchbar application. It feels great.

This, I don’t know, really weird. I might have to try it, but I doubt I will like it at all. The whole purpose seems like a secondry screen to me. Constantly having to look down instead of looking at the bigger screen so you can control is so backward to me.

I think this kind of thing is pretty cool, but ultimately, a touchpad below my keyboard is akin to the ones on the dashboard of many modern cars (though a lot less dangerous) in that I don't want to look there.

It's tough to imagine the end-user utility will outweigh the engineering challenges to make this viable longterm.

https://support.toshiba.com/support/viewContentDetail?conten...

On the flip side, having all keys as little oleds that can be remapped to anything I want is something I would likely use constantly.

I’d expect a standard user (and even myself) to be highly confused about if they can use the area as a trackpad or if they need to toggle some mode.

> Use the Touch Bar as an extension of the keyboard and trackpad, not as a display.

[0]: https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline...

Apple is probably bummed they didn’t release it first.

EDIT: I'm thinking of the Acer Iconia 6120, not an Asus product.

Regardless, why not just improve on using one's phone the way you can already with some 3rd party apps... since almost the first day touch screen phones were available? It can at least be positioned anywhere that works for you.

You'd also save the world a cycle of e-waste for the sake of “we too” 2nd hand innovation.

Imagine Microsoft would have actually worked with them to salvage and re-purpose the millions of Windows phones (now in dumpsters and land fills), as detachable touch pads.

The Amazon Fire Laptop with Special Offers.