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Comment by commandar | Hacker News Reader

I can walk into my local Best Buy and find an entire section of computers that are prominently featured that don't feature touchscreens.

http://www.bestbuy.com/site/laptop-computers/macbooks/pcmcat...

Traditional PCs are coming with touchscreens because Microsoft insisted on shoehorning touch into their desktop interface.

This is not a case of Microsoft being in danger of being left behind, but a repeat of the disaster of XP tablet edition - Microsoft completely failing to understand where touch is and is not appropriate in UI design.

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Macs are hardly the recipients of Windows installations. I fail to see your point. Does your local Best Buy store have a non-Mac area? I think you'll have a hard time finding a late generation laptop there that doesn't include touch.. at least the ones aimed at regular consumers (not business people looking for mate screens, or gamers looking for alienware-like stuff).

It's funny if you stay a bit in these areas and notice people immediately touching the screens. I've seen it quite a few times and the comments are all "hmm, no touch".

The whole PC industry is creating this demand for touch out of users' familiarity with them in their mobile phones. I have no use for touch on my laptop but a lot of people I know think it's cool...

>Macs are hardly the recipients of Windows installations.

Um, duh.

> I fail to see your point. Does your local Best Buy store have a non-Mac area? I think you'll have a hard time finding a late generation laptop there that doesn't include touch..

The point is that you're conflating supply of Windows-based touch desktops and laptops for actual demand for those systems.

> I have no use for touch on my laptop but a lot of people I know think it's cool...

And as somebody that deals with end users, I've yet to talk to anyone that didn't ultimately find touch in a laptop/desktop either pointless or outright counterproductive.

It's one of those things that people think is a cool idea until they actually use one for an extended period of time.

At least tablet PC was its own edition, not something forced on everyone.

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