I used to work regularly on a commuter train with a firm-provided touchscreen ThinkPad. The touchscreen was great on the train because it was faster (for many things) than reaching for the trackpad. And when you're in a sort of cramped sitting position, reaching forward feels natural.

I'm a lawyer by trade and am forced to lean on GUIs with little keyboard-control support. When I code (for pleasure), I don't miss the touchscreen, but I often miss it when I'm trying to read PDFs and Word documents on the go.

I had one for work a while back that could turn around so the screen faced upward while closed, effectively making it a bulky/heavy tablet. It was convenient for walking over to someone desk and discussing a topic. But it wasn't ground breaking enough for me to ever seek something out like it again. I rarely even open my laptop these days unless I'm in a conference room.

I look for touchscreens when looking for a cheap windows laptop for someone because they tend to be better quality screens (IPS, decent brightness, etc.) instead of some awful TN panel that's barely visible in a well-lit room.

I don't really expect anyone to use it as a touchscreen, but if they do, at least that will work too.

Kids expect all screens to be touch ready. Chromebooks they learn on in schools are touchscreen. It will be a competitive requirement before long, I think.

Getting rid of the fixed keyboard helps a lot (my preferred form factor), but even in the classic laptop form factor is makes a ton of sense IMHO.

There's a lot of small niceties that pile up into a better experience, the sister comments cover a bunch of those, so I'll focus on a macos specific nice point:

iPad and iPhone apps can now get direct touch when running on a laptop, instead of the mouse mode. With this, there is now a perfect platform able to run Mac, iOS and iPad apps outside of the ill-fated Vision Pro.

That's too little to late for me, but I think many will appreciate the benefits.

It seems like there’s an audience among older people and possibly children, but I don’t see a situation in which a professional at least would really or want a touchscreen. Do you really want the oil from your fingers constantly smudging up your screen, particularly a glossy one? Unless it comes with a pair of complimentary Apple windshield wipers, it's gonna get gross fast.

The only situation I could see it being useful in is if it came with a pressure-sensitive pen, so you could use it for sketching and drawing. But even then, that would only really work well if the screen folded all the way around, so it would sit flush against the base or if it opened 180 degrees, so you could lay it flat on a table without it wobbling around on a hinge.

Much like the Touch Bar, I expect that Apple will learn this lesson the hard way.

You’re not an outlier.

I feel the same but I noticed that the boomers and Gen Z both reach for the screen when I am showing them something and they want to interact with it(i.e. scroll a page or close a window).

Maybe the the intuitive and natural way of interaction is touch and the generations between the boomers and the Gen Z are the only ones who command the skillset to use computers in any other way.

I mean it's only $400 more than the LED non-touch screen.

Seems like it would be useful for app development being able to do touchscreen for the iOS and iPadOS simulators.

Oh in university it's a godsend having something you can just run PDF Annotator on and draw with a pen directly on your laptop. (Lenovo 20KK user here, got it for 200€ at a hamvention used, even came with a 4G modem)

You are an outliner. Touch is standard across every device. To not have it just feels like a deduction.

Even now, I find myself resisting the urge to tap things on my Macbook display as it is.

The world moved on. Touch is standard, and Steve Jobs was incredibly wrong with his weird opinions.

This is like people arguing that a computer mouse is not necessary in 1990.

5 trillion market cap. That's how much of an outlier (i.e. clueless) you are.