I see where apple is coming and I agree, touch on a traditional laptop or desktop is useless in my opinion, would much rather keep my hand on the track pad or mouse and manipulate things that way than reaching up to the screen. It only makes sense on hybrids, like the Surface Pro or Book, where you can detach the screen and use it as a tablet.
If you read carefully what apple execs said, the were talking about a traditional laptop, not a hybrid.
And there's this:
Soundslike they completely left it open that they can make a hybrid where there are no tradeoffs in apples point of view. That will most likely be their story when they finally release one.
I highly disagree, I absolutely love having a touchscreen on a laptop. It's great to have that interaction directly with the screen versus having a layer of abstraction with a mouse or touchpad. Of course it depends what I'm doing. If I'm writing reports then it's mouse all the way, but if I'm browsing the web its touchscreen all the way. It's just so intuitive to swipe back and forward, up and down, tap on links, etc.
As an aside I never understood how anyone could use a touchpad except in emergencies, that just seems like such an inferior control than a touchscreen or mouse. Ergonomically it's terrible as well in my professional opinion.
From apples point of view it's interesting their consumers wouldn't want a feature even if only used seldomly. The lack of touchscreen was a large reason I stopped buying MacBooks. St interesting what cook says, sing the lines of that stupid comment on combining toasters and refrigerators, demonstrating a profound lack of vision.
