I remember. I also remember Windows 8 which was supposed to make everything metro stylish and convenient, with tiling, ARM version, claims of being optimized and good for updating even on oldish boxes.
Back in the day my not-so-tech-savvy colleague bought a Windows 8.1 laptop that had a touchscreen. After two days she brought it to me and asked me if I could “rip this hellspawn out of this computer”.
Before wiping it we checked if there was anything to backup and the ~30 minutes I spent using Win 8.1 were hideous. It was the only time I ever had to use it, of which I am very grateful.
Ah a windows 8. I remember reading the promo materials for it. An OS designed around touch, with the goal of doubling the number of touch enabled PCs on the market.
Guess how many PCs were touch-enabled when windows 8 launched…
1.5%. Whomever is driving at Microsoft needs to be moved to an Amish community and prevented from interacting with any kind of electrical device ever again.
That’s not just MS, that’s all the world. I think it can be called pessimism at rational design. With Apple’s 90s decline and rebirth, and with many things in the 90s dying, the idea that you can’t ever rationally predict what humanity will need, or at least what will win markets, has become the easiest for executives and public alike.
So they, like everyone else, were trying to catch the vibe. This has recently culminated in jumbo extrapolators being stuffed as a solution for every purpose involving computers. Honestly if before that mess someone would tell me that computers are going to present a text prompt as the universal human interface again, and it would be conversational, I’d be excited and say that this is all I need.
I think that it’s similar to many other things - the first attempt at solving the problem is the wisest and the deepest. Machines had controls before computers available to everyone. Computer displays show UIs as those controls, traditionally. The same rules then apply that did before, control elements should differ by purpose and that purpose should be clearly indicated by form, color, feel and well-readable label. Computers also had, since teletypes, command line as a UI - you send a message of input, you get a message of output. A clear concept, connected to what a computer is.
We don’t need to go further and invent some new UI paradigms just because we’re not in digital-assisted heaven yet. But until the wide mass of users too knows that there’s no digital heaven, they will want it, and they will want to break paradigms and be given something new, not what they have, but the better thing that their magic thinking tells them they can have, because of human instincts.
We have been there with metaverses in early 00s, people still use Second Life. Most of us have grown and understood, internalized there’s no metaverse that can be built to create a digital heaven, or at least a digital space of cleaner philosophy and insight, like Lukyanenko’s “Depth” (sorry, I have a limited cultural context, and this in feeling seems to fit better than classical cyberpunk).
Now we are living through a new wave, of people and families and social subcultures that didn’t want to find such a metaverse, or create such a space, ever in their lives, and so didn’t learn the lesson, personally or collectively. But they do want another heaven, one mixed with reality, more similar to Star Trek, and they are hungry for it, and they are trying to find it similarly to how 9yo me was trying to find knowledge how they make all those 3d games and how can you make one not just draw objects, but live.
Windows 8 came out in 2012, and was in development years before that.
Windows 8 is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft. It was released to manufacturing on August 1, 2012, made available for download via MSDN and TechNet on August 15, 2012, and generally released for retail on October 26, 2012
Laptops is a subset of PCs. Only 10% of laptops were touch, not 10% of computers.
80% of users are dumb. A touchscreen laptop is an expesnive way to get your screen dirty.
I remember. I also remember Windows 8 which was supposed to make everything metro stylish and convenient, with tiling, ARM version, claims of being optimized and good for updating even on oldish boxes.
Same times as Nokia Lumia.
Back in the day my not-so-tech-savvy colleague bought a Windows 8.1 laptop that had a touchscreen. After two days she brought it to me and asked me if I could “rip this hellspawn out of this computer”.
Before wiping it we checked if there was anything to backup and the ~30 minutes I spent using Win 8.1 were hideous. It was the only time I ever had to use it, of which I am very grateful.
I actually kept it in dual boot alongside Linux to play SWTOR.
Ah a windows 8. I remember reading the promo materials for it. An OS designed around touch, with the goal of doubling the number of touch enabled PCs on the market.
Guess how many PCs were touch-enabled when windows 8 launched…
1.5%. Whomever is driving at Microsoft needs to be moved to an Amish community and prevented from interacting with any kind of electrical device ever again.
That’s not just MS, that’s all the world. I think it can be called pessimism at rational design. With Apple’s 90s decline and rebirth, and with many things in the 90s dying, the idea that you can’t ever rationally predict what humanity will need, or at least what will win markets, has become the easiest for executives and public alike.
So they, like everyone else, were trying to catch the vibe. This has recently culminated in jumbo extrapolators being stuffed as a solution for every purpose involving computers. Honestly if before that mess someone would tell me that computers are going to present a text prompt as the universal human interface again, and it would be conversational, I’d be excited and say that this is all I need.
I think that it’s similar to many other things - the first attempt at solving the problem is the wisest and the deepest. Machines had controls before computers available to everyone. Computer displays show UIs as those controls, traditionally. The same rules then apply that did before, control elements should differ by purpose and that purpose should be clearly indicated by form, color, feel and well-readable label. Computers also had, since teletypes, command line as a UI - you send a message of input, you get a message of output. A clear concept, connected to what a computer is.
We don’t need to go further and invent some new UI paradigms just because we’re not in digital-assisted heaven yet. But until the wide mass of users too knows that there’s no digital heaven, they will want it, and they will want to break paradigms and be given something new, not what they have, but the better thing that their magic thinking tells them they can have, because of human instincts.
We have been there with metaverses in early 00s, people still use Second Life. Most of us have grown and understood, internalized there’s no metaverse that can be built to create a digital heaven, or at least a digital space of cleaner philosophy and insight, like Lukyanenko’s “Depth” (sorry, I have a limited cultural context, and this in feeling seems to fit better than classical cyberpunk).
Now we are living through a new wave, of people and families and social subcultures that didn’t want to find such a metaverse, or create such a space, ever in their lives, and so didn’t learn the lesson, personally or collectively. But they do want another heaven, one mixed with reality, more similar to Star Trek, and they are hungry for it, and they are trying to find it similarly to how 9yo me was trying to find knowledge how they make all those 3d games and how can you make one not just draw objects, but live.
Sorry for an emotional dump.
Articles for 2013 are still available? It was ~10% for all laptops launched in 2013.
https://www.pcworld.com/article/451973/touchscreen-notebooks-snag-10-percent-of-the-laptop-market-report-claims.html
In 2023 The penetration is ~20% so by these metrics they did double the number of touch enabled PCs. It just took a decade too long.
In fact in 2012 - Intel did a study that said 80% of users prefer a touch screen. https://www.neowin.net/news/intel-80-percent-of-pc-users-prefer-touch-screens/
Windows 8 came out in 2012, and was in development years before that.
Laptops is a subset of PCs. Only 10% of laptops were touch, not 10% of computers.
80% of users are dumb. A touchscreen laptop is an expesnive way to get your screen dirty.