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Is not "light years ahead" of __all__ manufacturers, just the cheap ones. Surface laptop trackpads are on par with Apple ones.
I imagine the Microsoft surface touchpad would be closer comparison with Mac because Microsoft would have a chance to integrate the hardware with software.
Is not "light years ahead" of __all__ manufacturers, just the cheap ones. Surface laptop trackpads are on par with Apple ones.
isnt it JUST surface though? ALL the other track pads ive tried are abyssmal. A physical click is now a deal breaker for me on a trackpad.
I can give you my use case as anecdata:
The instances I am using a work laptop I am using it at a desk not on my actual lap. I will use the keyboard as much as possible and on the scenario that I am frequently using a mouse input I will make use of a vertical mouse to mitigate RSI.
My casual usage of a touchpad will probably be in the minutes on any given work day. For someone like me an advanced physical touchpad is not a value adding proposition.
Apple's Trackpad has been using Force Touch ( haptic engine ) since 2015. But I remember correctly my MacBook Air trackpad before Force Touch were excellent too.
It is one of those things where people "thinks" they are doing comparison when they are not. You often see enthusiast and nerds doing so called spec comparison. When in reality they missed out so many things. Better Keyboard, Better Trackpad etc.
The PC / Hardware industry has been operating at negative margin, with their source of profits coming from hardware branding rebate, software preinstalled, Data collection and selling etc. It was only the recent years did Gaming / E-Sports gave them another market to play with. And no one seems to enough incentives or resources to being a much better trackpad. That is why Microsoft had to step in and make their own Surface Line. Without some sort of quality assurance, the market will always be a race to the bottom.
I'm curious, in what way do you consider Macbook touchpad so much better? I have a Macbook pro, a dell, a Thinkpad, and I honestly can't tell which one I like better, they all work perfectly fine.
On an older Windows laptop the Synaptics driver even came with a "Restart" button in the control panel because it was so common that the driver would hang or crash.
AFAIK Microsoft's Precision touchpad drivers are much better though, but they are not compatible with my Windows laptop.
Correct me if I am wrong. I think all current Windows Laptop are trackpad with physical clicks. Apple's Trackpad has been using Force Touch ( haptic engine ) since 2015. But I remember correctly my MacBook Air trackpad before Force Touch were excellent too. It is one of those things where people " thinks " they are doing comparison when they are not. You often see enthusiast and nerds doing so called spec comparison.…
They all support tap-to-click though (some better than others). Personally I try to avoid the "traditional" click both on Windows and Macs, because they take so much longer than a simple tap.
I'm curious, in what way do you consider Macbook touchpad so much better? I have a Macbook pro, a dell, a Thinkpad, and I honestly can't tell which one I like better, they all work perfectly fine.
I currently have a mb air m1 and an XPS 9570. If I had to say which is the best touch pad, it's the macbook; larger and more precise. But it beats the XPS by so little that I really don't care. However, I have a textured dbrand skin on the XPS touchpad which improves the surface so much so that I definitely prefer the XPS anyway- but the same would likely be true of the macbook if I had a skin on it.
Neither are as good as the touchpad I had on my first generation Thinkpad Yoga - now those pads have a kind of unsatisfactory tactile click, but on the first generation thinkpad yoga the entire touchpad itself clicked downwards. No dead zones or insensitive edges, literally the entire pad moved, haven't felt anything like it since. In the same manner as (I assume) OP I'm always gonna feel that any touchpad is just nowhere close to as refined as that one example. And likely I'll never see its like again since I assume Lenovo stopped using it for a reason (reliability must have been a concern when you have one massive button in the middle of a slim Chassi) That laptop also had the keyboard where the keys recede into the body and go rigid when you fold the screen to tablet mode, as well as being water sealed and having runoffs out of the keyboard. Truly something else. The keyboard also set my standard for laptop keyboards which means that no other laptop keyboard has come close since except for that of a barely functioning used XPS L321X I got for 50$ when I was "between" laptops. So based on my very clear bias, most laptops on the market today including macbooks are steps back in keyboard and touch pad compared to my 2014 Thinkpad Yoga.
In the same way people compare macbook build quality to other laptops and always if the person has primarily used macbooks the outcome is given. Meanwhile I kind of hate how careful I have to be with the screen of my macbook compared to thst of my XPS or the precision M7520 I have for work. But I'm used to laptops that can handle field use and of course the macbook is always going to be flawed by comparison to my ideal.