Yeah its an odd move to me too. I imagine that there are less logistical barriers for a touchscreen for FW13 now that FW12 is out. I was totally expecting a FW13 touchscreen drop when I saw the FW12 announcement…
That is to say, here is another vote to please do a touchscreen for the FW13. It really would be an immense help/benefit for so many people (including myself), especially from an accessibility standpoint. It would also be neat to have it paired with the 360 hinges like the FW12 has, but I get that there is probably some significant redesign required for that (and also doing that from a buissness standpoint might be making the FW12 redundant). Even if adding a touchscreen to FW13 might be redundant from a product diversity standpoint, from a current userbase standpoint it makes a lot of sense and has plenty of support. I hope because of the things that Framework values, this reasoning is being considered.
For those concerned about the touch screen being “forced” (???)/don’t want it, then just don’t get it! /gen pos Thats the beauty of the Framework laptop.
Thanks for all of your hard work! It’s amazing to see you guys stick around and expand your line up!
I just recently had to repair a Lenovo Thinkpad X1 Extreme Gen 3 with the OLED and touchscreen option.
The price for the bare display+touchscreen assembly from Lenovo was a whopping $680. This for a laptop that is old enough that I can buy a used, excellent condition one with the OLED+touchscreen option for around $450 on ebay…
It is a nice feature to have, but it also has these downsides:
a) more power consumption
b) higher weight
c) if the touchscreen panel is bonded to the display panel (necessary for the best optical clarity), the total price of the replacement part is always going to be too high
I have a touchscreen right now and only use it maybe once a week at most. I even have a digitizer pen for it, and the pen stays in my laptop bag. It’s just not that useful. That said, whenever I switch from a tablet (iPad or Android) to my FW13, I find myself trying to touch the screen…
Anyway, I hope FW offers a touchscreen option on the FW13, BUT I would not buy it myself. I would prefer the longer battery life, lower weight, and lower repair cost.
I would hope that they design it so that the same 40-pin cable can be used with both the touchscreen and non-touchscreen panels, so as to make it easier for us to switch panels or do repairs.
I’m the same. I wanted a touchscreen & got one a couple years ago, though I’ve found I rarely use it. Half the time I forget it has touch. The other half, well my mouse is closer, less reaching!
But I sure love having the option! The times I do use it, it’s so nice to have. When every smartphone, tablet and smartwatch has touch, it feels just backwards and antiquated to me if my laptop lacks it. Idk how much touch costs to adds, but I would think it shouldn’t be much if they just made it standard on most screens. Economies of scale and all.
I also find it odd that 360° hidges aren’t on most laptops. I know it will block the fan intake on many if fully flipped, but it’s still useful for tent mode.
I think the day that touch panels on a laptop will reach the economies of scale we want is the day laptops become obsolete.
By this I mean that the real reason we have laptops is because of the keyboard (not the touchpad!). It is a “Human Interface Device” for rapid text entry. As soon as speech-to-text gets good enough to surpass typing in both speed and accuracy, people will stop using laptops and will start using their touchscreen tablets more often. That point in time is rapidly approaching.
Sure, it’ll make open-floor-plan workspaces a cacophony of madness, BUT I think they’ll solve that with better speech-to-text (able to accurately translate whispers). Also, humans have been through office cacophonies before, back in the days of mechanical typewriters and rotary phones in “boiler room” sales offices. Now we have remote work, so unless the employers force everyone to be on-site (and I think they will), it’ll still be better than the “boiler room” offices.
The one use case a keyboard beats speech-to-text is privacy, when you don’t want anyone else hearing what you are inputting. But I think privacy will also be a thing of the past. It already is dying as we speak.
I do think that mice will still remain useful even when keyboards are gone. I envision that offices of the future will have a large touchscreen, an earbud, and a mouse, but no keyboard. The mouse will remain in part because it is far more precise than touch; with a mouse, you can reliably point accurately down to the pixel. That’s hard to do with fingertips or digitizer pens on a touchscreen.
TL;DR: you WILL get the economies of scale of cheap touchscreens, BUT the form factor will be a tablet (probably with a kickstand to solve your tenting problem) and not a laptop because keyboards will become obsolete.