When you get used to the windows laptop trackpad you probably will no longer care.
Ask HN: Why is the touchpad on MacBooks still ahead of other manufacturers?
41–50 of 58 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why is the touchpad on MacBooks still ahead of other manufacturers?
#42Is not "light years ahead" of __all__ manufacturers, just the cheap ones. Surface laptop trackpads are on par with Apple ones.
You can walk through the entire laptop aisle of your nearest department store, and won’t find a single one that feels as precise, smooth or responsive. “Better than all” is a pretty apt description.
Re: Ask HN: Why is the touchpad on MacBooks still ahead of other manufacturers?
#43The first time I've actually used macOS was on a hackintosh'd Acer laptop, only out of curiosity. I didn't keep it as my main OS but I was surprised to discover the gestures and that they worked perfectly just as I know them today on my Mac. So a lot of the "magic" is in software. Windows Precision might be good at passing the sensor information on to the OS and apps but the implementation simply seems to not be as good. On top of that, at least subjectively, the giant touchpad made out of a glass slab with the haptic feedback just completes the mix, makes it feel right.
My first Mac was a 2015 late MacBook Pro, which is when they introduced the haptic stuff and I tried a friend's Air afterwards and I disliked the feel of the touchpad click in comparison. One of the most surprising little discoveries of moving over to a Mac for me was that despite having bought a Magic Mouse, I never really used it, my brain instinctually just kept gravitating towards the built-in touchpad, which is something I've never had with Windows laptops, in fact I had a seething dislike of the built in pointing devices on such machines all my life because I was way more effective with a mouse.
I've only felt the Mac touchpad slowing down my workflow was Photoshop (but still surprisingly OK), games (this is self-explanatory) and moving around multiple files, selecting and deselecting them. I'm fairly convinced that one of the primary comfort points that made me keep the Mac for the long term was the smooth gesture integration.
Re: Ask HN: Why is the touchpad on MacBooks still ahead of other manufacturers?
#44Apple designs the hardware, firmware, driver and OS.
For a Windows laptop the touchpad might involve 3 different vendors. And Windows supports older graphical APIs that just don't understand pixel scrolling. OSX doesn't, Apple just deprecated all of that years ago and told everyone to rewrite their app.
Re: Ask HN: Why is the touchpad on MacBooks still ahead of other manufacturers?
#45The old thinkpads (sandy, ivy) have great touchpads. Not for gestures or advanced features, but just for moving the cursor predictably, edge scrolling, and discrete buttons on the top and bottom.
I had an X230 for work back in the day, and I seriously disliked its trackpad. It was really small, and using the physical click on the trackpad itself felt rather cumbersome because the force required for a click seemed to be quite inconsistent for different parts of the trackpad. (The physical buttons are nice, but for a primary click I usually find it faster to click with the trackpad itself.)
I honestly prefer the feel of the trackpad on the X240 (despite the lack of proper physical buttons) that I still have for personal use.
Re: Ask HN: Why is the touchpad on MacBooks still ahead of other manufacturers?
#46Microsoft Precision trackpads get close on the software side, it actually feels like it responds a bit faster. Too bad there's a bug in the driver that makes the cursor jump a few centimeters on every dozen or so clicks (Confirmed on Mi Notebook Air, Dell 5285, XPS 15 7590, 2015 15" Macbook with 3rd party driver), making it essentially unusable.
Some manufacturers (Xiaomi) have glass surfaces that get pretty close to the feeling of Macbook ones.
... but nobody has force touch and that makes all the difference. Ununiform response, no configurability and nothing that gets remotely close to the "low" setting, besides maybe a modded XPS 15 (some tape below the switch).
Macbooks are literally the only devices I've used on which you can comfortably drag things on the touchpad for the above mentioned reasons.
Edit: That's just the basic hardware side, of course. Apple also has fairly well thought out gestures (zoom, back with two fingers to the right) and apps supporting them, including a direct response to the finger and overscroll bounce (except in Electron apps, shame on them).
Re: Ask HN: Why is the touchpad on MacBooks still ahead of other manufacturers?
#47Apple designs the hardware, firmware, driver and OS. For a Windows laptop the touchpad might involve 3 different vendors. And Windows supports older graphical APIs that just don't understand pixel scrolling. OSX doesn't, Apple just deprecated all of that years ago and told everyone to rewrite their app.
Ecosystem control is a part of the reason (strong focus on touchpad usage), but controlling both hardware and software is not. Proof: The touchpad's software side works just as well on hackintosh laptops.
Re: Ask HN: Why is the touchpad on MacBooks still ahead of other manufacturers?
#48My 2cents:
1. Tight software/hardware integration (MS have this also).
2. Premium segment positioning in the market, motivating differentiation on quality.
3. Apple brand overall is strongly identified with providing a quality user experience.
4. Other PC makers occupy majority of market which is low-margin, so no motivation to invest in this type of (relatively speaking) niche feature.
Re: Ask HN: Why is the touchpad on MacBooks still ahead of other manufacturers?
#49Is not "light years ahead" of __all__ manufacturers, just the cheap ones. Surface laptop trackpads are on par with Apple ones.
Also, I bet most of the Apple touchpad magic actually lies in the software. For instance the touchpad on an MBP doesn't feel all that great anymore under Linux (not a dig against Linux, it's just that writing universal touchpad drivers doesn't appear to be a simple and straightforward task).
I had the exact same experience putting Arch on an old macbook which led me to thinking it was more software than hardware but reading the comments here it does seem like a combination. There was a project from someone from the community here working on better linux drivers for trackpads.
Re: Ask HN: Why is the touchpad on MacBooks still ahead of other manufacturers?
#50I use a Mac daily, as well as Surface devices and a Lenovo.
Except for my Surface Book 3, nobody else even comes close to even the four-year-old AAA-powered Magic Trackpad I keep on my desk, although I was surprised at how good the Lenovo Flex 5’s trackpad actually is.
For me, it’s a combination of gesture support (which is why I use a trackpad alongside a mouse), sensitivity (very good hardware) and exquisite fine tuning of things like acceleration and pressure.
(I don’t use the haptic features on my MacBook Pro and prefer tap-to-click to press-to-click, so once a new device is set up, hardware differences become slighter.)