Presence beats pressure and nobody can print it

Most touchscreens in shops work by pressure. Two conductive layers separated by a tiny gap, and pressing hard enough to push them together registers a contact at that point. It is cheap, it has been in cash machines and ticket kiosks for years, and it works with a fingernail, a stylus, or a gloved hand.

The other kind does not detect pressure at all. It senses the disturbance a finger makes in an electrical field across the surface, which means it responds to presence rather than force.

On a specification sheet the pressure type looks better in several respects. Cheaper to manufacture. More precise, because a stylus tip is smaller than a fingertip. Works with anything, including a glove in February.

It loses anyway, and the reason is entirely about what the two feel like.

Pressing a screen requires a decision. You must commit force, and having committed it you wait to find out whether the device agreed that you pressed. That gap between action and response is short and it is perceptible, and it is why every kiosk in the world gets prodded twice by people who were not sure the first one registered.

The other kind responds to a touch so light it barely counts as one, immediately, and the immediacy changes the relationship. You stop operating a control and start moving the thing on screen, and the screen becomes the object rather than a window onto one.

That is a difference nobody can print on a box, and it decides the market anyway.

There is a second advantage that will matter more shortly. The field-sensing approach can register several fingers at once, and the pressure approach fundamentally cannot, because two presses on two layers produce one ambiguous average. Anything involving two fingers, pinching or rotating or holding one thing while moving another, is simply unavailable on the cheaper technology.

So the cost advantage is real and shrinking, and it is buying you a screen that cannot do the interactions people are starting to expect. I would expect resistive to retreat into industrial equipment and payment terminals within a few years, where gloves matter and gestures do not, and to disappear from anything a consumer holds.