Enjoying tech is one thing, wanting touchscreens everywhere is another. If they were so cool as an input device, all the cool kids would have ditched their mechanical keyboards from their desks.
It’s not the first time someone comes up with the next great thing that ends up being a user interface disaster. Light pens (w/ link for the younger crowd) come to mind.
Oh boy, forgot about those. Every school library used one to read a barcode.
You’re probably thinking of something else. You can’t read anything with those
Ooof. I remeber using light pens in the 80s at a dumb terminal at my local library to find books. It was painful…
Maybe the ubiquity of smart phones and all the functionality packed in to them has created a “touch screen == high tech” association in the general public.
But those of us who work with tech rather than just consuming it know the difference between functionality and UI. And we use nice physical interfaces like mouse + kb to interact with various tech all day, even if we use our phones too.
I have a love/hate relationship with phone touch screens. On the one hand it enables us to have controls that would be impossible on a phone, like selecting a point on a map, infinite variety of button controls, etc. On the other hand I can’t tell you how many times I’ve barely brushed the screen by accident and the damn thing is off doing something I didn’t want. “NO! DON’T SHUT OFF THE APP YOU…sigh”
Yep, physical input devices all the way. I literally just upgraded my computer from an Aya neo (touch screen only), to a GPD Win 4 specifically to have more physical inputs. While the Win 4 is also a handheld gaming pc (that is even smaller than the Aya), it has a slide out keyboard and an optical mouse sensor, which has honestly made so much of a difference in being able to use the device. Even just simple things like scrolling through Steam has become easier, never mind situations that involve any sort of typing.
I still love my Aya though, things a tank.
