Touch support will be more or less required by Windows 8

Dec 7, 2011 14:03 GMT  ·  By

Ultrabooks may not have touch support as a default feature now, but they definitely aren't going to lack it forever, not with Windows 8 in the pipeline.

Digitimes is playing its part as supplier of small bits of information with potentially big implications.

This once, it is ultrabooks and their likely future exploits that the news and rumor website's sources spoke of.

One that stood out is the prospect of giving Apple's MacBook Air trouble, in addition to the slight pressure ultrabooks will exert against tablets in general and, thus, the iPad in particular.

Granted, at present, Ultrabooks aren't much of a daunting foe to either, far from it.

2012 should get them to sell for much less than they do right now, though, and their performance will improve as well.

What will stand out most, however, is that they will begin to incorporate touchscreens as default, even if not from the very onset of the next year.

It would be counterintuitive to add touch support on top of a feature set that already makes it hard to drive prices that much lower than $1000 / 800-900 Euro.

It is later, when affordability will be attained (when Ivy bridge chips show up), that touch LCDs will not place the notebooks outside the budget range of most prospective buyers.

After that, Ultrabooks will get less and less pricey, until they are cheap enough to truly give Apple MacBook Air, iPads and Android devices a run for their money.

That should coincide with the release of Windows 8, so default touchscreens will be key, as the operating system, unlike Windows 7, won't lack an interactive, touch-optimized UI.

Display makers now have to invent new touch display designs, since today's resistive and capacitive solutions aren't thin enough and, in the case of the latter, not exactly all that cheap either.