The PC industry’s response to the rapid rise of tablets has been to push touchscreens into laptops of all shapes and sizes. Two years ago, at Computex in Taiwan, Intel announced it would use its Ultrabook fund to boost production of large touchscreens in anticipation of a 3-5x increase in demand for them over the next couple of years. The following year Intel said that with its Haswell platform the number of laptops with touchscreens had tripled in comparison with the prior Ivy Bridge generation.
Based on a quick survey of the shelves at my local Best Buy, it sure seems to have worked. Of the 40 laptops on display, 31 had touchscreens. (This tally includes convertibles like the Lenovo Yoga that are clamshell designs, but it doesn’t include detachables or devices that are primarily tablets such as Microsoft Surface Pro.) Some of these are priced under $500. Intel now says that touch has penetrated the PC market even faster than its successful Centrino wireless platform.
So I was surprised to see a report today coming out of Taiwan(where most of the world’s laptops are made) stating that touchscreen laptops will be phased out. The technology news site DigiTimes reported that orders for new clamshell laptops with touchscreen have “disappeared completely.” I doubt that touchscreens are about to vanish from clamshell laptops altogether, but there are some reasons why this trend may have peaked.
First, as DigiTimes suggested, what little growth there is in the PC market is coming in large part from cheap laptops such as Chromebooks and Windows laptops that cost as little as $200. In that price range, there is little room for a touchscreen, which adds cost. Second, the arrival of the 14nm Broadwell Core M has led to a renewed push for 2-in-1s rather than clamshell laptops. To some degree this is semantics—the Lenovo Yoga 3 Pro is a Core M-based clamshell that also converts into a 13-inch tablet.
But there’s also a difference between the penetration of touchscreens on laptops—which seems quite high, at least here in the U.S.—and actual usage. I’ve had several laptops with touchscreens, but I rarely use the feature and spend nearly all of my time on productivity tasks using a keyboard and mouse.
