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Comment by dagw | Hacker News Reader

First of all does anybody seriously believe that anybody will be using the Surface to do the sort of work where shifting a layer one pixel to the right is critical? The mouse isn't going to disappear, and I have yet to meet anybody who seriously thinks it is.

As to styluses, it seems to be a fairly solved problem. Most designers I know use a Wacom tablet of some description. And those with a big enough budget use a Wacom cintiq (which is basically a huge touch screen).

As for things like selecting text and other in between tasks, I agree that current solutions aren't great. However I suspect people are working on it. My initial guess after having thought about the problem for 3 seconds is that some sort of clever context aware zooming and input scaling might be a good place to start.

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> does anybody seriously believe that anybody will be using the Surface to do the sort of work where shifting a layer one pixel to the right is critical?

No, but the article gave me the impression that touchscreen + keyboard = the future of computing. I'm just trying to point out that the future of computing might involve one or two additional devices.

Of course the mouse isn't going to disappear. Many people buy mice with laptops nowadays, even though every laptop comes with a trackpad. The question is, will this trend continue with Surface-like devices, or is mouse sales going to plummet?

It's been a while since I've bought a laptop with a usable trackpad. For example I just got a Dell, a $1,500 Studio 15 not a crappy low-end one, and the trackpad is broken. I've even had it replaced but it still refuses to move the cursor about 50% of the time. Mice are preferable to every trackpad I've used, even Apple ones.

Of course this doesn't address things trackpads can do that mice can't, like multitouch gestures. But for pointing quickly and accurately, I always have a mouse paired to my laptop.

The Apple trackpads are large at 5+ inches and responsive and reliable. I love mine. I had multi-touch and gestures hacked into a Linux driver on my old Dell five years ago but it was never nice like this.

And Apple also makes mice that do gestures and multi-touch on the touch responsive top surface.

Gosh, I sound like a fanboy here but I really despise the fruit-based company for their evil corporate practices. You just can't beat their hardware, though.

You just can't beat their hardware, though.

I agree; the Macbook trackpad is literally the only reason why I don't have a Thinkpad.

PC trackpad quality has gone down the drain since everyone started to implement multitouch. Multitouch never works properly on cheap PC laptops, and the crappy drivers they bundle with such laptops make it a PITA to perform ordinary tasks like dragging and dropping. I could drag and drop more reliably on my 2001 laptop than I can on my multitouch-enabled 2010 laptop with the dreadful HP "clickpad".

That's a good point, you wouldn have expected mouse-using-holdovers to eventually give up, but if that's happening it's happening slowly. Still see people using mice with laptops all of the time. Could expect the same to hold true with the transition to tablets.

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