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Comment by humanizersequel | Hacker News Reader

>Touchscreens are worse than buttons

Hottest take I've seen on here for a while. In a very specific, very limited set of mobile usecases, buttons may offer a more pleasant experience than a touchscreen. I only say that because there's usually exceptions to any statement, but I can't actually think of one.

Touchscreens didn't win because of some lazy sheep-like consumerism, they won because the product is superior. If Chat-GPT style models defeat traditional search engines it will be because the product is better, not because people are content with a response that "seems correct."

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Let me rephrase: if you have a set interface touchscreens suck. No one would choose to use a touchscreen over a physical keyboard, or steering wheel, or mouse for an fps game.

It’s a crap interface compared to others but it’s the best to do anything. That’s why it won.

Trivial counterpoint: you cannot correctly operate a touchscreen without looking at it (unless the display is essentially one single interactive object). Trying to use a music player via a touch screen while running or cycling is basically impossible unless you look the screen. For this purpose, buttons are better.

When defining "better" you need to indicate the metrics you are using. LM's might be "better" when measured with certain metrics, but like most things are worse when measured using other metrics.

To be fair, touchscreens won out because of the Asian, specifically Chinese market. They were too poor to own laptops and wanted big phablets. Hence here we are today.

I still miss my landscape key board phones. The droid 4 still holds a special place in my head.

I think it's more that touchscreens are superior for certain kinds of activities, like consuming information in the form of feeds, videos, and images. Mostly because the screen is larger for the same device size. Buttons are more accurate for typing, and often (I believe, without citation) faster for typing as well, even compared to swipe systems.

One is not superior to the other over all, but each is better at certain things. The difference is that more people will pay money to maximize their user experience scrolling through feeds and watching videos, compared to typing emails.

Buttons are much better than touchscreens, if you have a fixed interface that fits in the space available.

Touchscreens win when you need multiple interfaces in the same amount of space.

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