My wife and kids are all using Microsoft Surfaces, and switch back and forth from using them as tablets (often using them a video cameras, cameras, sketchpads, dictaphones with speech to text conversion, and video chat terminals put in a stand) and using them as computers with keyboard and a USB mouse.
For the kids especially it's interesting to watch them, because when they're actually trying to interact with what's on the screen precisely, they reach straight for the mouse and touch unless it would involve completely breaking what they're doing to go find the mouse.
Before I had them on Surface Go's, I had them on cheaper, very underpowered Evoo 2-in-1's, which were horribly slow under Windows, but ran beautifully under Fedora...including all the touch screen, rotation stuff.
> So yes, I guess they “make a ton of sense” if you want to support a use case nobody has, on hardware that doesn't exist
For programmers, no, we want the older UIs because the keyboard and mouse are the best input devices for what we do.
But there is a lot of hardware out there used by a lot of people that does switch back and forth. It's not only the Surfaces. It's iPads with the more and more ubiquitous keyboards. It's all the other 2-in-1's that are being sold. And they're actually really handy machines and fit into far more niches and enable far more interesting behaviors than straight laptop.
I got a touch-enabled laptop for work a few years back. I thought it was bloody amazing at first, like all those cyberpunk dreams about fancy touch screens from the early 90s came to life.
Four the first six hours or so, that is. It's one thing to use touch devices for one or two hours at a time, and for a mix of work and media consumption. It's a totally different thing to use them for eight hours straight, poking at the screen virtually all the time. If you really want to prove a point, I guess you can get through it, but saying "it works" is a stretch. It works the way dragging a cart with square wheels works -- you can eventually get it where you want to be but that's the extent of the good things one can say about it.
I really wanted to prove a point so I kept trying it for about three weeks, and I gave up. Those three weeks probably got me about three years closer to RSI, too.
It's not just a programmers' thing, it's pretty much any kind of professional work. Graphics, CAD, word processing, spreadsheets.
> It's not just a programmers' thing, it's pretty much any kind of professional work. Graphics, CAD, word processing, spreadsheets.
Yes, for anything where precise control on the screen itself is the necessary thing, keyboard and mouse reigns supreme.
There are also people who use their devices moving around in the world. I remember watching a realtor using their giant smart phone at once point. Camera, voice to text, scanning documents...it was more like a mobile version of office facilities than manipulating things on the screen. It's different work and the peripherals and mode of interaction are different.
For the kids especially it's interesting to watch them, because when they're actually trying to interact with what's on the screen precisely, they reach straight for the mouse and touch unless it would involve completely breaking what they're doing to go find the mouse.
Before I had them on Surface Go's, I had them on cheaper, very underpowered Evoo 2-in-1's, which were horribly slow under Windows, but ran beautifully under Fedora...including all the touch screen, rotation stuff.
> So yes, I guess they “make a ton of sense” if you want to support a use case nobody has, on hardware that doesn't exist
For programmers, no, we want the older UIs because the keyboard and mouse are the best input devices for what we do.
But there is a lot of hardware out there used by a lot of people that does switch back and forth. It's not only the Surfaces. It's iPads with the more and more ubiquitous keyboards. It's all the other 2-in-1's that are being sold. And they're actually really handy machines and fit into far more niches and enable far more interesting behaviors than straight laptop.