Would it interest you to know that in my store we sell quite a few touchscreen desktop PCs per week? And that we receive many more expressions of interest from people who will buy a touch screen, but are (quite reasonably) waiting until they need to upgrade?

Windows is not and (with the possible exception of ME) has never been an “absolute disaster”. This is just plain wrong. Smarter people than you know that when you have a job to do, you pick the best tool for that job.

For every apple machine there is a windows machine that has it beat hands down for performance, features, price or a combination of all three.

Stop watching television. You’ll be surprised how much better you’ll feel.

I’ve been using computers since before “Macintosh” existed, sold, serviced and supported computers and their users for almost 2 decades. I think I know how people use computers. I have no trouble being a “fanboy” of Apple. Until Windows 7 at least, for the average user (and not corporate business user) Windows has been an absolute disaster.

Regarding the Reddit comments and yours: I can give specific examples of everything I say. For example, touch screens in computers (excluding PDAs, mobile phones and similar) are, as far as I know, most widely used in places such as kiosks and in customer devices such as ATMs. The use of touch-screen tablet PCs is most widespread in hospitals in the USA from what I can gather. It’s common information that Steve Jobs was asked to design a tablet computer for medical uses, which he declined.

The average joe who watches Sunrise certainly doesn’t use a touchscreen computer at home and I doubt that the presence of touchscreen computers for home users will result in a major paradigm shift in the way people use their computer. Apple, if anyone, has the ability to create touch screen devices that people will use and that will change the way computers are used, such as already has occurred with the iPhone.

Reddit agrees.

As you say touchscreen technology has been around since the 80s and, for general use on desktop/notebook computers, has never really taken off. Why? The main reason is simply that if you start dragging shit around you leave fingermarks on the screen. In a number of cases it’s also easier for a user to continue using input devices they’re already using (keyboard, mouse) to select something rather than move their hand to the screen.

There are some benefits with touchscreen, however, in certain areas where touchscreen is used as a primary input device (eg, iPhone, POS system, wall-mounted info kiosks, surface PCs). That’s fine and it’s great that Windows 7 at least has better support for touchscreen input methods than its predecessors, since it will predominently be used over OSX on the cheap PCs that will run behind the scenes driving these highly customised applications. [I'm sure OSX is up to the task but it seems like such a waste to use a Mac to drive a POS terminal or an info kiosk screen!..]

Of course I havent included tablet PCs into this equation. We know PC-based tablets haven’t really taken off til now so it will be interesting if Win 7 or the anticipated Apple tablet will turn this trend around.

Mr Blasina suggests that “touch is a big part of what’s available in Windows 7″. I strongly disagree for these reasons!