Agreed, what is it with the push to touch screen? Although I expect it's manufacturing - better to make all of them touch and then up-sell the customers :/
I find it interesting this reversal of the argument versus when the iPhone originally debuted and people were questioning that decision to go to almost nothing but touch for the device.
Touch is one of the most natural forms of interaction to people. A screen without touch, to a young child, is "broken". The more screens with touch in our lives (such as say the iPhones and iPads), the more that seems to apply to any age that a screen without touch starts to feel "broken".
This is what I find strangest about the arguments by people for the MBP Touch Bar: so many people that support agree how useful touch is. Wouldn't it be more useful just to make the whole screen touch capable than to stop part of the way there with just a tiny strip?
The boldness of the original iPhone at the time was relying entirely on touch. The MBP Touch Bar seems a strange hesitation relative to that.
What's wrong with touch? Critically, it lacks the bandwidth of other forms of input. It's for consumption, not creation. It leaves the screen dirty. It encourages wasteful use of screen real estate by UI. You imply everything else is 'broken' because children like touch, however I believe that's just because touch mirrors physical interaction which we are all familiar with from birth, and thus 'better for the less cognitively developed'. You can't touch this.
«Critically, it lacks the bandwidth of other forms of input.»
The most classic forms of input (keyboard and mouse) are touch manipulations of plastic artifacts: their bandwidth is essentially a subset of touch rather than any other way around.
With modern touch screens we are only beginning to scratch the surface of touch sensory bandwidth. Certainly there remains plenty of interesting areas to expand haptic feedback. There's also plenty of ways left to blend and hybridize touch sensitivity and gestures and even context sensitive/context reliant physical objects (like digital pens/pencils or even how our keyboards might interact with touch).
«It's for consumption, not creation.»
Many of the earliest forms of human creativity were manipulating things through touch. Maybe we haven't yet arrived at something like a good approach to digital sculpting or pottery, but that doesn't mean that we won't.
Even then, I've seen amazingly creative touch apps. There are some really cool touch apps in music creation, just off the top of my head. The fact that you associate touch with consumption (and "less cognitive development") may say more about you than the world of touch apps that already exist.
«It leaves the screen dirty.»
Yeah. So? Things get dirty when you use them. You find ways to clean them. Are you keeping your screen pristine and untouched/undirtied because it needs to be sconced in a museum some day?
I get that it's a personal preference and it plainly drives the Monk-esque sorts of OCD wild, but at the end of the day, entropy wins anyway.
«It encourages wasteful use of screen real estate by UI.»
One person's waste of space is another person's accessibility. Touch invites larger click targets to better accommodate the fatness of people's fingers. That accommodation, however, also helps people with accuracy issues with a mouse (which has always been a big deal easily ignored). Even further, it helps those situations that shouldn't demand accuracy in the first place. When I'm working on a spreadsheet at work, why does every click need to be a "headshot" to get my work accomplished? Lining up those shots takes time and energy I could be spending on the actual work. Just because mice can be pixel accurate doesn't mean they should be. As monitor resolutions increase and DPI increases and pixels shrink this only becomes crazier when an application has a small pixel-accurate hitbox. (It amazes me how many mission critical Enterprise apps you see with old school 16x16 pixel icons on toolbars running on modern hardware as if those businesses have a need to be FPS sniper schools.)
Fitt's Law suggests we should do better than that. Targets that are bigger and/or closer to the mouse pointer are easier to hit. If it takes touch to force more developers to be more mindful of Fitt's Law, then that alone is reason enough to support touch.
We were discussing current touch technology, not future haptic what-ifs.
Bandwidth is information transferred over time. Whether you are discussing input (push/gesture max) or output (can't see the screen because hand is in the way), current-era touch is inferior to traditional input systems.
You failed to provide even one example of a creative use of touchscreens, except a vague music reference. I've seen those apps too, they are frustrating to work with and any serious musician would use a (musical) keyboard with real velocity support in preference.
I agree UIs need to move forward, I simply disagree that current-era touch is creative or high enough bandwidth to get us anywhere useful.
Well, I was originally discussing the merits of just making the MBP screen touch friendly (using current technology) rather than the half-step of the Touch Bar. Why corral touch to just a tiny, sub-screen, if the touch is useful enough to add the bar in the first place? Again, my fascination here is primarily with the people that like the Touch Bar but don't think a Touch Screen would be useful, given how important it was to the original iPhone that the whole thing was touch capable. If the Touch Bar is useful, then a full touch screen would be surely be more useful?
From that perspective a touch screen, even with current technology, is still more bandwidth than no touch screen at all and more creative than no touch screen at all... I'd argue that does get us somewhere useful.
I don't think the onus here is on me to provide examples of how useful that may be, but on you to explain why perfect is not the enemy of the good, in this particular case.
