The Unreasonable Stance: Touchscreens are just a fad
So you’ve got your iPhone and your iPod Touch and your Microsoft Surface, and maybe you’ve got yourself a little pink DS lite. What do these things have in common? Two things: they all share a trendy interface — the touchscreen — and they all will be forgotten in a few years’ time. The touchscreen is a minor blip on the giant radar of human interface devices, and it won’t be long before these fragile, useless contraptions are relegated to the dust bin of history. Why do I take this utterly insane position? The reasons are multifold.
Touchscreens and their relatives have been around for a long time. For more than a decade, the touchscreen’s little brother, the touchpad, has dominated the laptop pointer motion sector. To be honest, it wasn’t even necessary, as the precision and comfort provided by the pointer nubbin on so many Thinkpads is still amazing. Not to mention the fact that so much space is wasted on either side of the touchpad. From a design perspective, the touchpad was a disaster. And I don’t even want to think about the wear and tear on my poor finger pads from all the swiping back and forth – I’ve probably had to regrow my fingerprint 20 times since they changed from the nubbin. And don’t get me started on the iPod’s scroll wheel – we all know it was better when it actually spun.
And let’s look at the evidence around us: touchscreens have been available for a long time, but how many do you own and actually use? I notice your keyboard is covered in little buttons. Your mouse has buttons, not to mention the fact that it’s a hundred times more sensitive and responsive than a touchscreen. There are buttons on your monitor, your TV controller, your gamepad, and you know that in the situation room under the White House, there’s a big red button – not a touchscreen with “launch/don’t launch” options on it. There are even buttons on your iPhone.
Unreasonable Stance is a column in which one CrunchGear writer tries to argue for the other, not usually accepted, side. Sometimes it’s satire, sometimes it’s trolling, sometimes it’s gibberish. Most importantly, however, it is an attempt to see a technical issue or product from another perspective, something we rarely do in our compartmentalized, partisan world.