Intel: Touch Screens Likely in Windows 8 Notebooks
Apple chief executive Steve Jobs once pooh-poohed the notion of a touch-screen laptop. PC OEMs building notebooks for Windows 8 will apparently try and prove him wrong.
Apple chief executive Steve Jobs once pooh-poohed the notion of a touch-screen laptop. Apparently PC OEMs building notebooks for Microsoft's Windows 8 will try and prove him wrong.
Gary Richman, the director of marketing for Intel's PC Client Solutions Group, said this week that OEMs are making "specific and pretty dramatic product decisions" to put touch screens inside traditional clamshell notebooks in time for the Windows 8 launch.
Intel's PCSG serves as sort of a concept lab for the notebook industry, developing concept designs and other research that it shares with its partners. According to Richman, the that eliminated a physical keyboard in favor of a pair of touch screens was based on a design Intel came up with four years earlier.
On the other hand, that doesn't mean that OEMs must work with Intel, either. The Apple MacBook Air, for example, launched before the ultrabook spec was announced. But, Richman said, Intel was involved with the design of the , "pretty much defining the ultrabook space before there was an ultrabook space," he said.
Why shouldn't a tablet-style touch screen be used as a notebook display? Primarily, Richman said, because Apple chief executive Steve Jobs said so. Jobs famously explained that users who interacted with a vertical touch screen mounted on a notebook would develop a "gorilla arm" that would quickly grow fatigued. "Touch surfaces don't want to be vertical," Jobs said in 2010.
"I didn't buy into that," Richman said. "And I saw the direction where touch was going, how touch was growing more ubiquitous in all our lives, you know, iPads or smartphones or ATM screens, and I wanted to challenge that conventional wisdom. But I knew that there was such a legacy of believing that this was a bad idea that we had to have a really compelling stoy and evidence of this."
So, Richman said, the company crafted its own hour-long usability tests, working with users around the globe with prototype clamshell-style notebooks with touch screens installed.
"What we found is not only did they not dislike it, they in fact loved it and found it very delightful," Richman said. "They said that it was natural, intuitive, an immersive experience, it made everything they did on their notebook more fun." Participants described it as "freeing," and not fatiguing, he said.
Richman declined to comment specifically on OEM partner plans, but said that "they're making specific, and pretty dramatic product decisions for when Windows 8 launches, based on those insights."
The touch-enabled Windows 8 notebooks will provide a counterpoint of sorts to Windows tablets running on processors designed by ARM, Intel's competitor in the embedded space. Intel was not involved in those OEM designs, Richman said, and Intel's PCSG also does not participate in smartphone work with OEMs, such as the .
Instead, Richman said that OEMs may design products based on a convertible tablet design that Intel showed off at IDF Beijing. The tablet-like display swivels, so that the notebook converts to a tablet form factor without undocking, like the Eee Transformer from Asus. Intel has also shown off the "Nikiski" concept, a clamshell PC design with an slim, long touch screen that runs the width of the notebook and can be used as a secondary display for "snacking" on data when the notebook is not in use.
Richman said that Intel's work directly influenced the design of the touch-enabled Windows 8 computers that will arrive at time of the operating system's launch. "It was not going to happen," without Intel's influence, he said.
Editor's Note: A previous version of this story misspelled Richman's name.