HP TouchSmart

» see hp.com/touchsmart as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

hp announced the touchsmart iq770 at ces in january 2007, six months before the iphone. it was a 19-inch all-in-one desktop with an amd turion chip behind the panel and a resistive touch overlay on top. you sat in front of it and prodded the photo viewer with your finger. the idea was that the family pc should sit in the kitchen, not under a desk, and that touch would replace the mouse for the casual half of computing.

the line ran for almost a decade. iq500 in 2008, iq800 with blu-ray, then the 300 and 600 series moving to capacitive touch around 2010. the touchsmart 9100 went into business price lists. hp built a custom shell on top of windows called touchsmart software that gave you a sideways carousel of photos and weather and a music tile. it was the kind of skin that microsoft would later borrow and bury inside the windows 8 start screen.

by 2015 the touchsmart name was gone from hp's consumer catalog. the all-in-one form factor survived under the pavilion and envy brands, but the dedicated touch identity was retired. windows 8 had proven that nobody actually wanted to lean across a desk to scroll a webpage, and the ipad had absorbed the casual-touch use case entirely.

i was on a tower with a separate monitor through that whole period. ankara electronics stores in 2008 still sold the standard desktop case, and the all-in-one touchscreen was the thing in the front window that people pointed at and did not buy. the touchsmart sat in the seam between two computing eras, too late to be a pc and too early to be a tablet.

~ the dossier ~

~ what it actually was ~

under the marketing, the touchsmart was a regular windows desktop with a touch panel and a custom launcher. the hardware was fine. the software was the gamble. hp shipped touchsmart software 1.0 through 4.0 as a separate layer on top of vista and windows 7, with widgets for facebook, twitter, hulu plus, and a notes app you could finger-paint into.

most of that layer was unused after the first week. the windows 7 desktop was still where the real work happened, and the touch panel was useless for typing or precise selection. reviewers called this the gorilla-arm problem before windows 8 made it a household complaint.

~ what killed it ~

two things in sequence. the ipad in 2010 took the kitchen-counter casual-touch use case and never gave it back. windows 8 in 2012 tried to recover it for the desktop and failed badly enough that microsoft walked the interface back in windows 8.1 and then again in windows 10. hp had no third move. the touchsmart became one more all-in-one in a market where dell and lenovo were also selling all-in-ones, and the touch overlay stopped being a differentiator.

~ what it left ~

the all-in-one form factor survived without the touchsmart brand. hp still sells one now, you can buy it, it sits on desks in receptionist areas and small offices. the dream of touch as the primary input on a desktop machine did not survive. that part went into the surface line and stayed in the tablet half of computing where it actually worked.

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