Report: Touchscreen Notebook Shipments Increased by 51.8% in Q1 2013

[RedundantInk]

According to a report from DisplayBank, shipments of touchscreen equipped notebooks increased by 51.8% in Q1 2013 to 4.57 million units.

Report: Touchscreen Notebook Shipments Increased by 51.8% in Q1 2013 : Read more

 

[bak0n]

That's probably due to windows 8 being horrid for a mouse. More power to the touch screen 8. Just leave it off my 65" plasma HTPC.

 

[bebangs]

Touchscreen laptops are overrated.
Hype created by microsoft/manufacturers and not driven by demand.

 

[JackFrost860]

An increase from 1000 units to 1518 units is an example of an increase of %51.8; but thats not a very necessarily an impressive number of sales.

 

[JOSHSKORN]

It won't last. Is it too early to break out the champagne and say I was right?

 

[CaedenV]

Touchscreen laptops are overrated.
Hype created by microsoft/manufacturers and not driven by demand.

Not entirely.
I owned a cute little ASUS touch screen netbook which had win7 on it and touch was awesome. It was much more convenient to use the keys and touch than the keys and mouse for 80% of my use on it. After putting win8 (CP) on it I literally never used the mouse for anything and actually disabled the mouse so that I would not have to worry about rubbing my palm across it.

The issues were of course having finger prints on it which would have to be cleaned, and being an older resistive screen it added a lot of glare to an otherwise above-average quality netbook screen. But for anything in the 14" or smaller laptop realm touch is actually quite useful, and if they put a glass screen on it then it would be much easier to clean smudges.

Get much bigger than that, or in a desktop environment where you sit much further away from the screen, then I completely agree that touch is completely useless. However, I have high hopes for more gesture based motion control as found with leap motion or kinnect style technology to make touch-like controls more useful for those platforms.

Still not going to completely replace keys and mice though.

 

[bobbybamf12]

So if there more touch screen laptop there will be more touch screen computers sold.... interesting.

 

[bobbybamf12]

So if there more touch screen laptop there will be more touch screen computers sold.... interesting.

 

[InvalidError]

How many people who buy touch-enabled non-convertible laptops actually use the touch-screen as a primary input method?
I know if I had a touchscreen on my PC/laptop, I would still use the attached keyboard/mouse/trackpad most of the time due to:
- wanting to keep the screen clean
- keyboard/mouse is faster and more precise
- holding arms at screen height puts more strain on my arms than the keyboard does
- using the mouse/trackpad avoids having a very large chunk of the screen covered by my hands
So the number of PC-based activities where touch might be desirable when traditional methods are available is somewhat limited.