The time has come, my wife's 2 year old laptop with a touchscreen we bought at Costco for $400 is finally dying. I use a custom Windows desktop at home (no touchscreen) and a rMBP at work so I'm not too much into one or the other. So we took a trip to the Apple store so we could look at Apple's devices.

And of course the size and performance of the regular old MacBooks were really enticing. Price was higher than I think my wife wanted to pay (she's gone years on sub $1000 computers and the instant upgrade every couple years when the old is replaced with the new is a feature to her), but she was seriously thinking about it.

We spent about 20 minutes sitting at one and my wife trying out MacOS and really seeing it was effective at handling some of her frustrations with Windows 10. And over those 20 minutes you could see her start to really take to it, the nice screen, the tiny size, the responsiveness of the touchpad...then suddenly she reached up to the screen to make a small adjustment and scroll a web page she was looking at and the spell was broken -- no touchscreen. She didn't buy the Macbook.

It turns out, even though she doesn't use it all that often, the fact that it exists and is expected to work and it didn't was all she needed to know. She pointed out that all of her other devices: phones, tablets, etc. are all touch screen, that moment when it didn't work required her to think twice about scrolling rather than just doing what she was expecting to do was enough to make her not want the entire device.

We discussed how many issues there are with Windows 10's usability and all that and I guess where we left the conversation was that there's no expectation that Windows will work effortlessly, you go into "using mode" expecting to have to think through tasks and fidget with things until they're correct, so there's no spell to be broken, but you know that you can reliable get things done. And that sets a baseline for her of what she thinks a computer should be at a minimum and she's willing to pay $500-700 for that.

She admitted that up until she touched the screen the extra $500-700 for the Apple computer started to seem okay to her because the "using mode" was so good. But then it didn't work and there was no way to make it work. It was like swimming through heaven and then sitting on a cloud the wrong way and a loud buzzer went off BZZZZ. The buzzer vaporized that extra value for her instantly.

It's something I've never considered because my computers fundamentally don't have touchscreens so I'm trained to expect it. I don't think of my MacOS usage all that much different than my Windows usage.

Microsoft was correct in enabling touch, but what it really not making the Surface line interesting is that they swim in a market of machines that more or less do the same thing (maybe not as quite as well) that are half the cost. Unless your use-case is particularly sensitive to some specifics of the performance of this machine, you may as well hit up your local Costco and get a machine with the same RAM, and 2x the storage as the best configuration here for 1/3rd the cost.

Sure it'll probably die on you inside of 2 years, but then you buy another semi-disposable computer then, get all the upgrades from the future and still be 30% under the cost over 4 years. Windows doesn't provide a usage experience that demands a price premium and this laptop is missing things that we know will become commonplace within the expected lifetime of the device.