News: 1588660329

In the beginning, laptops originally had the keyboard at the front of the laptop, with trackballs all over (even located on the screen on the Compaq LTE). Apple's Powerbook 100 was the first laptop where the keyboard was at the back, with wrist rests and a trackball between. Masses of advantages, not least ease of use and comfort. Trackpads became normal, replacing nipples and trackballs. Almost all laptops follow this defacto standard configuration... because it works.

Changing to put the keyboard at the front and a giant secondary display out of eyeline and removing the trackpad doesn't do anything for usability, especially if on a lap (legs sloping, wrist rests hold the laptop in place). Anyone with a modern Apple Macbook Pro will know the limited use of the trackbar above the keyboard -- useless for a touch typist.

Maybe, just maybe, a grown up in Microsoft woke up and smelt the coffee before the children wasted enormous effort on a fundamentally flawed design?

@wibble

Your 'children' comment hit the nail square, they appear not to have anyone in the design chain who can remember how the current defacto was arrived at, mostly trial & error with a bit of carpal tunnel syndrome.

It's also possible the design process was just a slightly technical marketing meeting with no keyboards in sight.

Yes - and this is a very interesting point about experimentation vs refining proven designs. Nobody wants to stifle new ideas, but we keep getting too much change for changes sake. UX is the worst example, where a new generation of designers threw away decades of progress in favour of a "clean" look.

Desktop OS makers need to be really careful about fragmentation too at this point. There's already a lack of decent native software, so trying to get traction on niche hardware designs like dual screen Windows 10X devices is going to be a quite a challenge.

I want the nipple!

(Registered by IBM but surely designed by a bloke. Bright red too!)

" Anyone with a modern Apple Macbook Pro will know the limited use of the trackbar above the keyboard -- useless for a touch typist."

Depends how long your fingers are....

Not that I use mine, I'm generally tethered to my monitors etc, and using an external keyboard/trackpad anyway.

Re: " Anyone with a modern Apple Macbook Pro will know the limited use of the trackbar above the keyboard -- useless for a touch typist."

While I have looked at (and lusted after) the Macbooks with touch bar, I haven't bought one. The problem is, while I am not trained, I touch type. As such, I don't generally look at the keyboard I am using. The problem with putting any form of screen on the keyboard is that it forces the user to alternate looking at the keyboard and the screen, which, ergonomically, probably isn't good. That said, in my experience, most laptops, from an ergonomic point of view aren't that good anyway.

I do think that IBM/Lenovo had the right idea, when they mounted a small secondary LCD on the side of the main LCD in their Thinkpad W700ds, but mucked it up because, by all accounts, the small LCD they used was awful.

Still, we do seem to be getting an awful lot of portable, a4 size external monitors that use battery, and are small enough to go in a laptop bag or rucksack, which could be handy when working with a laptop, although you would still need a reasonable size desk or table to use one. No sticking the whole setup on the fold down tray table on a train or plane..

Multiple screens needs improving on regular Windows 10. Why do apps open up on different monitors, and dialog boxes pop up off-screen where they're difficult to track down or move. All too frequently I'm jumping back to single screen mode just to find them.

This! Although I love multiple screens, apps frequently open on the wrong screen, if I close an Excel sheet on screen number 3, a different spreadsheet steals focus on screen 2 (why?). Custom screen scaling also causes problems for multi-monitor setups (use a custom value and it must be applied to all screens). Hence, plenty MS could do first to improve regular W10 for this.

Saying that, improving W10 and fixing its various faults has never been a priority for MS anyway, so I'm not surprised here.

Bob, the one man doing that job is currently furloughed...

I think you overestimated the staffing level of that department by one.

You're missing the point about it being a completely different model; applications need to behave in a radically different way, it's not just another screen. Look at Apple's TouchBar, where applications will need to present new menus.

For example, you could locate the "Ribbon" down there to free up the main screen for content.

Even MS can't get multiple screens to work right in applications that you would expect to run on PCs with them. As a test - try to restart a SQL server from SQL Server management studio if you have 3 screens. I get the first confirmation on one screen, the second on another and the admin request on the third! Priceless!

This is exactly why I don't use dual screens. I totally appreciate the advantages but the OS quirks gets in the way too much. I find I can work quicker with a single screen and heavy use of Alt-Tab, which works the way you expect it to when there's only one screen.

Expect a Windows which can't run almost nothing locally and always needs to be tethered to a cloud something to work - while slurping more data than it does now.

Next, they will connect you to the cloud as well, don't know if in a Borg or Matrix-like way.

Why no gimp icon?

The fact that they've pivoted away from dual screen just reinforces my concern that it was a gimmick all along, just something to differentiate and try to generate some interest.

I'm much more interested in the OS though. With the mess they've been making if Windows 10 it is time to try something different. My SP7 feels like great hardware let down by poor quality software that I don't completely trust, so if there's a way to install it cleanly on that I'll be all over it.

Can't believe Bluetooth has got to version 5.2 and no-one's thought to make it a profile that works on a headset without making the audio sound like arse.

Don’t knock fully functioning Bluetooth. My 2012 MBP hopes to get one for Christmas, finally.

"Our customers are leveraging the power of the cloud more than ever, and we believe the time is right to lean into this acceleration in a different way." WTAF does that mean?

It means it's time for bullshit bingo, I'd say!

It means the person that wrote the release has an MBA