That just hasn’t happened with Windows touch screens.
Yes, Microsoft did fuck around and find out with Windows 8, but by the time Windows 10 landed an entire decade ago, this whole issue has been completely settled. That’s right, your Windows/Linux user friends have been using touchscreens (or no touch screens) without issue for a decade. No UX sky has fallen in this regard.
There’s absolutely zero downside to having a touch screen on Windows and you also absolutely don’t need a touch screen to use it.
I’m using a touch screen on my Linux laptop right now and it’s great. I don’t have to use it. The screen being touch didn’t cost me extra money. It’s just there if I want it.
The Apple camp seems to believe that every technology included with a product must have some kind of intentional holistic value. Apple removed the USB-A port because USB-C is the future. Apple removed the escape key and the function keys because the Touch Bar would replace it.
But the truth of the matter is, sometimes the option to just include both isn’t some kind of magical barrier that Apple can’t do.
You go out and buy a ThinkPad X9 15p and it has 3x thunderbolt, HDMI, SD card, and USB-A. Why doesn’t a MacBook Pro include USB-A? Well, remember, USB-A is the past! It’s legacy!
But the thing about it being unnecessary doesn’t change the fact that it remains trivially expensive to include, and it comes in handy for a bunch of peripherals that aren’t even that old.
So, I think this is why everyone assumes that Apple is going to destroy the OS because of some new thing they add to the hardware. Because the Apple cult is all about the mythical finely crafted experience. If you don’t do things the Apple way you’re holding it wrong. but in Microsoft/Linux-land, they don’t really care. Linux is fully free, and Microsoft knows their demographic net is too wide and their marketshare is too high that they can’t dictate form factor, choice of peripherals, etc. Their whole philosophy is that Windows is suitable for anything and everything.
The Apple culture can’t contemplate a technology company just including an extra option for users with no specific intended use case. PC manufacturers include a touch screen because, screw it, it only costs a few cents extra and maybe someone might like it, software integration be damned/that’s not our problem.
Macs had managed to avoid this degradation for a while because they didn't have touchscreens, but Apple put in the giant finger-friendly padding regions as part of the UI changes in Tahoe, which got a lot of negative feedback. Now that they're introducing touchscreen laptops, it's unlikely that they'll ever fully revert those changes since it will make the touch experience worse.
We forget this because Windows 7 was ugly and Windows 10 and 11 are nicer looking and that feels like progress, somehow. But you don't get nearly the functional information density with Windows 11 that you did with 7.
The taskbar icons are the exact same size. The tray icons are the exact same size. I’m struggling to figure out what’s different.
I personally use KDE which you can fully customize in terms of sizing, it’s great on a touch screen.
Windows laptops never expected tough screen adoption to hit 90% and still touch degraded the experience.
The worry here is that with Apple's e2e design control over the Mac, that this pivot will mean our MacOS UX will be removed in lieu of a more iPad-like experience.
Just look at other developer-friendly features like unlocked bootloaders, background jobs, unsigned software that Apple has removed from their hardware .
So this is a big deal and significant. It's different than you running Linux on your Windows laptop because the touch experience there never had a chance to push out the traditional UX.