NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- In 2013, Google (GOOG) went from zero to hero in the laptop market. This is one reason Google stock generally outperformed Apple (AAPL) and Microsoft (MSFT) in the last year or two. Being one of the first users of Google laptops, I started warning about this trend in a long series of articles already in December 2010. People laughed at me all the way, but I was finally proven right. It took two years for Google to work with its key hardware partners to get the product right in order to dramatically outgrow Microsoft and Apple. Unlike Apple and Microsoft, Google doesn't report laptop or PC sales -- or in Microsoft's case, OS licenses. Therefore, we rarely see a big quarterly headline showing what we now know, that Google murdered Microsoft and Apple in the laptop market in a record-fast time. For market share data, we go to our new King of retail, Amazon (AMZN). Of the top 14 best-selling laptops on Amazon, five are Google laptops and only two are Apple. Of these five best-selling Google laptops, three are variants of the Acer 720. This new Acer 720 has become the Honda (HMC) Accord -- or Toyota (TM) Prius -- of the laptop world. It's the new volume king -- "America's laptop" if you will. It's the laptop that saved Acer as a company, after it intelligently chose to ride the Google laptop wave shortly after Microsoft started to decline. Briefly speaking, this is a 11.6-inch laptop that weighs 2.8 pounds. It doesn't have integrated LTE but relies on WiFi for wireless connectivity. When you buy the Acer 720, you get an extra 100 gigs in your Google Drive account, and the device intelligently makes sure that the stuff you are likely to need can be cached on the device's 16-gig solid-state storage. The Acer 720 first came in two versions: One with 2 gigs or RAM and the other with 4 gigs of RAM. The former is $200 and the latter is $250. I reviewed the $250 version on Oct. 17 as it was just hitting the market.



Now, Acer has added a third version of this best-selling laptop to its arsenal: one with a touchscreen. It's $300. First of all, just to be clear, the only thing you will notice that's changed with this new version is the touchscreen. If you didn't know that it had a touchscreen, you would never guess. This begs the question: Do you need a touchscreen on a laptop like this? My answer is that, for close to 99% of you out there, the answer is a resounding "no." At this point, putting a touchscreen in a Google laptop is the answer to a question nobody was asking; a solution in search of a problem. In over three years of using a Chromebook every single day, at no point did I say to myself, "Wow, if this thing just had a touchscreen, it would be perfect." It's perfect anyway! Be honest: How many of you are using the touchscreen on your touchscreen-enabled laptop? When do you reach forward, pointing like an orangutan exercising a new yoga pose, with your greasy fingers onto the precious screen? Other than in a Microsoft ad, never. Using your fingers on the screen is something you do on your tablet and obviously on your smartphone. Not on your laptop. The reason for this is it's far more productive to use a mouse or trackpad, than trying to edit your article or email on the screen with your finger. Why? Your finger needs big touch targets. In order for a laptop to be useful for fingers on a touchscreen, it needs to have a completely different kind of interface than the one we are used to on a laptop. A laptop is optimized for fine granularity that the trackpad and mouse afford. This is another way of saying that Apple is and has been 100% right about the laptop and tablet being two very different animals. Microsoft has tried to marry the two in the same device, using two different software interfaces -- one for fingers, the other for trackpad/mouse.

