Touchscreen vs No Touchscreen

[zachthebomb13]

If this has already been answered, please send me the link, as I didn't find it.

I'm in the market for a new laptop this year. My old one is over 5 years old now. I like to get laptops that I know will last several years, so I'm thinking around the $1000 range. I'm trying to figure out why or why not I should get a touchscreen.

I've never used a touchscreen laptop. What are the pros? And what are the cons?

Battery life is going to be important for me this time around. I'm going to military training this fall, and will be packing my laptop around with me the whole time. I'd rather not have to take my charging cable too. I've heard that having a touchscreen on your laptop can hurt your battery life. Is it significant?

Thanks all!

 

[Chintan Gohel]

If this has already been answered, please send me the link, as I didn't find it.

I'm in the market for a new laptop this year. My old one is over 5 years old now. I like to get laptops that I know will last several years, so I'm thinking around the $1000 range. I'm trying to figure out why or why not I should get a touchscreen.

I've never used a touchscreen laptop. What are the pros? And what are the cons?

Battery life is going to be important for me this time around. I'm going to military training this fall, and will be packing my laptop around with me the whole time. I'd rather not have to take my charging cable too. I've heard that having a touchscreen on your laptop can hurt your battery life. Is it significant?

Thanks all!

My personal opinion is this:

Touchscreens are useful when doing creative work like drawing, colouring etc
They can also be useful if you can have the device close to you, such as on your lap - for scrolling and zooming - especially in portrait mode - but your device needs that ability to rotate

If it's the normal kind of laptop, clamshell design, then using the touch is more of 50-50 - some cases you'll use it, sometimes you won't

As for the battery, if I'm not wrong, the battery life would reduce a bit if the touchscreen is on all the time -but if it were disabled from device manager, then the battery life should be the same

Battery life is most affected by processor and graphics use, internet and then followed by screen and other peripherals

 

[justjun555]

If this has already been answered, please send me the link, as I didn't find it.

I'm in the market for a new laptop this year. My old one is over 5 years old now. I like to get laptops that I know will last several years, so I'm thinking around the $1000 range. I'm trying to figure out why or why not I should get a touchscreen.

I've never used a touchscreen laptop. What are the pros? And what are the cons?

Battery life is going to be important for me this time around. I'm going to military training this fall, and will be packing my laptop around with me the whole time. I'd rather not have to take my charging cable too. I've heard that having a touchscreen on your laptop can hurt your battery life. Is it significant?

Thanks all!

Choose 360 degree hinge laptops.
This laptops will function every tasks as well as normal laptops but also offers bonus use as a tablet for various things
1) tent mode provides much better video viewing experience than normal laptops
2)portrait mode: normal laptops force users to use them in landscape mode but so they are not suitable for things like reading a ebook or comics etc
Due to 360 degree hinges you can flip your screen behind keyboard and use it in portrait orientation for reading ebook or pdf or comics,some other non professional activities such as browsing your favorite blogs,reddit ,Twitter etc
So if this bonus tablet like features matters to you then choose 360 degree laptop. If not then just buy normal laptop without touchscreen.

About battery life it depends on the laptop models you choose.Always check reviews of laptop you're considering before buying.

 

[irfan aloha]

While going on Military camp, If your work is like creating design, plans, maps or something attractive then the use of touch screen laptops are helpful and vice versa in case of buttoned laptops. The important thing is the life of battery of a laptop. Obviously touch screen laptop machine consumes the more amount of power supply as compared to other systems. By the way Happy Journey!

 

[ochhanz]

Generally the closer the screen is, the more handy it is, though you can use e.g. a microfiber stylus to 'extend' your arm but that doesn't allow gestures ofcourse. I found the touchscreen more useful on my 11 inch laptop than on my 15 inch laptop, though I used it on both. Touchscreen is handy when:
- you need to scroll horizontal & vertical through e.g. websites or documents or ebooks or writing code or such.
- you want to zoom in/out alot (note that with open source program GestureSign you can add as many gestures as your heart desires).
- use drawing software (e.g. autocad, paint/photoshop like programs etc).
- (can be) when making notes, especially when drawing formulas etc.
- If you play tower defender or mobile like games alot.
- probably something else I am forgetting currently...

 

[neilbey]

Here's the thing: having a touchscreen isn't dinging your battery enough to really notice a difference (resolution, however, does). There are plenty of touchscreen 2-in-1 devices that get all day battery life. You don't lose anything by going with a touchscreen, you only gain a new plane of interaction with your PC. With the gravitation towards touchscreen "everything" your best bet is to go with a touchscreen.


I agree with a previous poster: go with a 360 degree hinge device. There's a lot of benefits with this, with little drawback. I particularly like the HP Spectre x360 (minus the bloatware, of course). You can pick up the HP Envy x360 for cheaper, and still really good build quality. Not a huge fan of Lenovo, but the yoga 720 is decent without the needlessly complicated "watch-hinge" the 920 has. Dell's are ok (more of a fan of their enterprise line: latitudes)

If you are getting a 13-14 inch screen. Don't go with 4k. You won't notice enough of a difference between a 1080p screen and 4k for the hit in battery life.

If you want REALLY good battery life, you may just wait for the windows on ARM 2-in-1's to come out and save some money too (if you can sacrifice some power-user functions like hyper-V, higher processor speed, etc)). The win on ARM stuff supposedly gets 24 hours of use from one charge

 

[GraniteStateColin]

I find the touchscreen, even just in laptop mode, is one of those things that once you've gotten used to it, you can't live without it. Even using a mouse wheel is much less precise for scrolling in a web browser, Word, or Excel, than touch (never mind that horizontal scrolling in Excel with a mouse is painful). Same for pinch-to-zoom.

I work on a desktop and a laptop. I prefer the big screen on the desktop, but I hugely miss the scroll and zoom of the touch laptop when working in Excel. And for a web browser, I flat out prefer the laptop for the touch capability.

For those who say touch is not needed on a laptop, I'm not sure if they have never really gotten used to it, so they don't know how helpful it is, or if there really are different use cases and some people wouldn't use it even if they were accustomed to it. However, because you can't know until you live with it for a while, I would certainly recommend getting a touchscreen device so you have the option.

 

[Hirox K]

I have a few Alienware NB with no touch screen... we all know how KB+M work so nothing much to say here.
I do enjoy touch control on my Surface Pro and tbh, I'd love to have a touch screen on my future Alienware.
It's more efficient to just swipe up, down, left, right for browsing (micro control the scroll or swipe real hard to go to the bottom instantly), pinch to zoom, or perform a swipe left right action to an object etc.
Button A & button B (reasonable size) on different side of the screen, try touch / click it in ABABABAB order and tell me which method is faster and more accurate.
And of course, if you are a creator... pen + fingers work nice with Adobe products.
Swipe away list objects (e.g. email list) is fast and easy.
Some video players allow you to swipe to micro-control play time.
A quick pinch in and out a pato have a quick zoom in view works flawlessly.
etc, etc.

 

[inzenity]

No-brainer, always touch.

Lately i even noticed reaching for the flatscreen when messing around with the htpc, but i'll admit that's a highly unusual use case.

 

[pallentx]

IMO, it depends on what you do with your computer. If you 100% sit at a desk and do a lot of typing on classic desktop type apps, then you may have no need for a touch screen. If you find you might want to watch Netflix, or sit on the couch in tablet/touch mode surfing the web, email, etc, you may find the touch apps and capabilities useful.

I have a SP4 and probably spend 60% of the time with the keyboard removed in slate tablet mode - basically all touch only. This is my default use at home for web surfing, listening to music, Netflix, etc. If you imagine a lot of this kind of use, I would say avoid the 360 hinge style devices and look for devices with removable keyboards.

If you think you wont use touch mode apps much, but want the option occasionally, then I would look for the 360 hinge options that prioritize a traditional laptop mode first with tablet use secondary.

 

[anon(10172601)]

Have used a Yoga 910 for my main development machine for a couple of years now and the touch screen has limited value there. Use it mostly for testing an app that requires touch.

But I also use that same 910 for media consumption, both when traveling, and even around the house as a second portable tv... and well touch has a lot of value there. In both tent and presentation modes touch is the only way to go.

That said... eventually Apple will give in and create a Mac with touch, and then Microsoft should officially quake in their boots. Apple's strong mobile ecosystem paired with highly portable, highly powerful, Mac laptops would present a very ugly situation for Microsoft in both the Enterprise and Consumer spaces.

On the other flank they face Chromebooks (some of which are already touchscreen) that can run Android apps. Schools are adopting these devices en-masse. And should Google ever wise-up enough to release a Chromebook powerful enough to run Android Studio, developers will have little reason to own a Windows laptop only so they can create their Android apps on it.

All said... touch screen 2 in 1s are about the only cool thing left to the Windows OS right now. And if either one of following happens a) Apple creates a touch screen Mac, or b) Google makes a touch screen Chromebook that a developer can code Android apps on I'm afraid the the perfect storm will have hit Microsoft.

 

[Mattemt294]

I wouldn't buy a touchscreen laptop if it is a clamshell. I don't see the appeal in a 2 in 1 besides the surface or surface book. Even a laptop on a hinge seems pointless.