I feel like Apple has developed this arrogant belief that anything that fails in the marketplace fails because it wasn't being done by them. Like, touchscreen laptops have been done in the past and Microsoft has already done the market trials to show that people are not interested in having to raise their arm to interact with their OS.
I agree that touchscreen laptops are silly, but what you're claiming about the market is the exact opposite of the reality of the current Windows laptop market. Microsoft may well have done a study that showed that, but if so they
still added touch capability to Windows and if we go by "the market" today, touchscreen laptops are
wildly successful:
Have a look at
Dell's laptop product lineup. There's even a convenient checkbox over in the filter thing between "touchscreen laptops" and "non-touchscreen laptops". Based on that, just under half of what Dell sells are touchscreen laptops, only a fraction of which are 2-in-1s. But even
that is misleading, because more or less every high-end model in the lineup has a touchscreen option, and in some cases the
only way to get the better-quality screen is if it's also a touchscreen.
I ran into this exact issue buying mobile Precision workstations for work a couple years ago; if you wanted to give the user the better screen, you got a touchscreen whether you want it or not.
Likewise
HP's laptop lineup; outside of the bottom-end and gaming series, virtually every model either has a touchscreen option or is only available with a touchscreen.
Now, the caveat here is that I've only a handful of times seen someone who has a touchscreen laptop at work actually use it that way, so it's entirely possible it's classic WinTel manufacturer mentality of "shove the feature in there because it's a feature" regardless of whether anybody cares. But the feature is incredibly common (particularly at the higher end), has been for years, and for all I know a lot of people actually want it.
I rewatched Minority Report the other day. Maybe I wasn't the only one, and too many executives take montages of Tom Cruise swiping in midair while wearing Power Gloves accompanied by classical music as some indication of how people want to interact with technology.
Gorilla-arm Syndrome--the entire reason that Minority Report and many other sci-fi computer interfaces look fantastic in a movie but would be a nightmare to use in real life--is my best evidence that Apple at least understands why a feature may have failed and makes an effort to improve on that:
The AR interface of the Vision Pro could very easily have been exactly this, and it would have been tiring and worthless for extended use. But instead, while it
looks exactly like Minority Report, you can just keep your hand by your side and tap your fingers together to initiate an action while letting your eyes do the selection. It requires even less motion than using a mouse for most actions, is
not tiring, actually
does work, and when the calibration is good feels almost like magic.
This doesn't mean I want to do all my computing with AR glasses or an AR headset, but Apple understands extremely well how to make the interface for such a device actually usable.
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