I hope this business of yours works out because a laptop that isn't a piece of junk with too much stuff I don't need inflating the price is something I've been wanting for a long time.
I've still never seen a PC with a sane touchpad. That's the first issue in a long tail of grievances with the PC laptop ecosystem.
EDIT: This isn't a generic "pro-Mac" dig, I want a nice PC laptop because I like dabbling with Linux; however, even the high end trackpads are clunky, even with the pre-installed Windows (never mind the eternal sadness that is Linux trackpad configuration).
For whatever reason, I've never used a laptop that wasn't a MacBook that has had a trackpad anywhere as amazing as what Apple has done. I don't know if the problem is hardware, software, or both, but as a consumer I don't care. I'll never buy a non-Apple laptop until I can find one that has a trackpad as good or better. That's my personal requirement. On a personal laptop I always use the trackpad so I want it to be the best.
> That's my personal requirement. On a personal laptop I always use the trackpad so I want it to be the best.
100%. On my personal devices I don't want to compromise on trackpad or keyboards (I like that apple went back on the butterfly keyboards).
The rest of my comment is just my personal experience so take it with a grain of salt. I've found the trackpad experience on the XPS and Thinkpad X1 laptops to be excellent under linux. The libinput [1] drivers seem to work really well and the gesture support seems nice too. What I miss from MacBook's touchpad is force-touch. Not having to worry about which part of the touchpad i'm pressing was really nice when I used a macbook.
I'm contemplating purchasing a m1 macbook air as my next laptop, but I'm also not sure i'd be willing to give up on being able to run linux natively on a laptop I buy with my own money.
> I'm also not sure i'd be willing to give up on being able to run linux natively on a laptop I buy with my own money.
May I suggest sponsoring Hector Martin on GitHub[0]? He’s working on building first-class support for the M1 architecture (including drivers) into Linux.
If it includes a GPU driver, then the trackpad driver is trivial compared to that.
Actually manufacturing the trackpad hardware might be difficult/expensive, but since that's already a given, the driver can be tweaked in tons of ways to fit the regular macOS experience...
A GPU driver for a new undocumentated architecture is "trivial" compared to properly doing an input driver for a touchpad?
You make "properly handling any type of free-form user input" sound like rocket science, when it's the regular multi-touch kind of driver we have on billions of mobiles, and laptops...
The "properly" here is just the sauce for macOS handling, not some inherent difficulty of "handling any type of free-form user input" on a 2D surface...
It's because there is no great trackpad support outside the Mac. But there is good GPU support. So it seems, getting great trackpad support IS rocket science currently, for whatever reason. (I also wonder, what is going on there? I guess people on the other platforms just don't care about this detail, otherwise they would be on the Mac anyway).
There are a lot of crappy trackpads on crappy PC laptops, but the ones on the high-end laptops are quite serviceable even if not the ideal version that Apple created. With a serviceable trackpad, the other benefits of having a PC over a Mac tend to far outweigh the trackpad (for people that value what a PC brings).
Yes, I understand that, I am just not getting my head around why for example Windows is so bad with a trackpad either. I mean, how tough would it be for Microsoft to nail this if they cared?
They probably don't see it as their job. The fact that trackpad quality varies between makes/models implies that it's both a hardware and a software problem, the latter probably being drivers. Maybe there is something in the OS that hampers it though, I don't know. Would be interesting to hear from engineers at the OEMs. Frankly, when I read these comments about the problems of PC trackpads, it's like a foreign language to me. Problems with gestures, multi-touch or palm strikes.. I can't recall the last time I had a PC laptop with those problems. My XPS 2-in-1 9310 sits in a bag across the room and am typing on a four-five year old Lenovo right now, neither of which have any such problems. What I notice on the wife's MBP trackpad is the feel (glass) and the (good) lack of physical movement in trackpad - this lenovo is clearly a momentary switch and at the very upper end of the pad the force to needed to click is tougher, but it hardly matters. A tap accomplishes the same thing that a physical click does and is probably how I engage it most often. I'm just not sure it's as big a problem with decently-built PC laptops as people make it out to be. PC hardware has a lot more going for it that overshadows the delta between a 99% trackpad and a 94% trackpad. Things like a touchscreen, active digitizers, tablet modes, escape keys, function keys, facial recognition, variety.
I will never need a touchscreen in my laptop. That's what my iPad is for, which I can connect to my laptop, by the way. Function keys I've last used in the previous millennium, and I've got an escape key, thank you very much. My laptop automatically unlocks via my watch. But yes, I expect facial recognition to come to the Mac very soon, too.
And I've never used a PC trackpad with satisfaction rate of > 30% ;-) They are all shite.
I guess it is just a matter of preference. As I said, if you care about the trackpad, you will never touch a PC laptop. If you don't, you think you have a 94% trackpad, and that it doesn't matter.
I imagine getting the trackpad right is either a giant pile of heuristic rules, or a nice tagged data set for ML, or both, maybe with a side of online learning from usage. A trackpad that automatically does the right thing for me coding, my 12 year old gaming, and my 8 year old with sloppy fine motor control does seem like rocket science to me.
I didn't mention this in my comment, but i use wayland on linux and i've found the touchpad experience to be nicer there compared to X11, even though both X11 and wayland sessions for Gnome use libinput. I don't know much about libinput to know why I feel a difference in my touchpad experience between X11 and wayland.
It has to be software. I have a ThinkPad that I recently installed macOS on (not advocating hackintosh, but it's a fun project nonetheless) and the trackpad feels every bit as good as a real Mac. Smooth scrolling, smooth gesture recognition, everything just feels good. The hardware is capable of processing the gestures, but the non-Apple software just does a terrible job of making it feel good to use.
It’s definitely not just software. If you connect an Apple Magic Trackpad to a Linux machine running X, it works way, way better than the garbage that’s built into most PC laptops.
Also note that Lenovo itself has a huge variation in trackpad quality. My relatively new thinkpad (thinkpad-branded but I think the model number was yoga 360) from work has a trackpad that is just barely usable. My personal yoga c740 has a trackpad that is actually pretty nice and gets close to MBP quality when it comes to movement/accuracy (it does still lack gestures and good right-click support though, and that is likely a software issue).
I really hope these guys pick good trackpads. I can grudgingly live with a stunted feature set (gestures etc) for now because I know X makes it difficult or impossible to get right, but I absolutely cannot abide a trackpad that feels shitty and inaccurate just for moving the mouse around.
I suspect the key software is in the firmware of the trackpad itself. The hardware does a lot of processing of the raw signals before it hands the data to the trackpad driver. The driver does additional processing, of course, but this also means that alternate trackpad implementations need more than just the right driver code. The firmware plays a key role.
> I suspect the key software is in the firmware of the trackpad itself.
What your parent comment (the comment you replied to) said refutes the reply you made.
They installed OSX on a ThinkPad, and observed the desired OSX-like trackpad behavior. Apple does not write firmware for thinkpad pointing devices, so it cannot be firmware-specific behavior.
I have Intel MacBook Pro and the behavior of trackpad under Windows in BootCamp is just terrible while in a Windows VM or on a remote Windows desktop it is almost as good as on Mac. So I doubt it is in firmware.
It it software. As they did to ios, the MacOs has highest priority to all interface actions.That's why the scrolling on ios and MacOs is usually very smooth. The interface get the highest priority so if the computer is struggling with lots of simulaneous processes, the interface still will feel smooth. Very smart solution to prioritize UX. Why they didn't do the same on windows/android? No idea.
Also good defaults. In fact they don't even have certain settings in MacOS. For example you can't change the pointer acceleration, but the default one is just perfect.
Funny you say that. I'm a long-time MacBook Pro user, that migrated to Microsoft (!) Surface Go (!!) running Windows 10 (!!!) recently. Not only is the OS tolerable (after I figured how to prevent crashes ... I mean, automatic updates) and the device more convenient than any I've used before (a real computer in the iPad form factor), the trackpad is amazing as well, I truly don't notice any difference with MacBook Pro trackpad!
I care a lot too - but I care about a lot of other features, too, and refuse to buy Apple.
My conclusion was to disable the trackpad and always carry an external mouse. I do a lot of CAD work and there's nothing that compares to a real mouse for speed and precision.
I'll use my Trackpoint nib in a pinch, but the trackpad ecosystem is so bad that I just write it off entirely. Yeah, keeping a mouse on hand is annoying, but it's like a physical keyboard: Would you ever buy a laptop where you had to input reams of text with a touchscreen keyboard? No, that's absurd, keyboards are a necessary part of a computer. Would you ever buy a trackpad for a desktop PC? I wouldn't, I'd use a mouse.
Apple users buy Apple trackpads for their desktop. The Apple trackpad experience is better than a typical mouse, even when it comes to speed and precision.
That's what happens when you're the most successful technology company in the world, and you hire the best engineers in the world and laser-focus them on thr user experience.
Not to dismiss your comment - my partner is an architect and also swears by the mouse to navigate in 3D - but I got an external trackpad when getting an external keyboard (to replace my poorly performing MacBook keyboard) and I have preferred the trackpad to a mouse for sometime. This is from someone who spends a lot of time in design software. I don’t think this is uncommon, either, although I’m not sure.
That's fair, but on my personal computer when I'm lounging on the couch, a mouse isn't going to cut it. I'm also talking specifically about laptops. Apple laptops have the best trackpad experience I've ever used. So my personal laptops will always be Apple until I find something better.
I'm guessing a big reason why it has never been prioritized is due to the difficulty of quantifying the impact of great trackpad UX (and as a result, the negative impact of the shitty trackpad UX every non-Apple device offers). Higher-ups don't like things that aren't easily quantified.
Don't understand the downvotes. I believe that it's exactly this. It's an industry where you can point to a competitor's machine and compare gigahertz and megapixels and terabytes and gigaflops and build press releases on those numbers, where an industry leader tries to make a point with "It doesn't run Rocket League!", where manufacturers like Dell can put a nice touchpad in one machine and then build twelve awful ones a year later because they have so many models on so many markets that no one is even able to say with confidence why certain models have been more popular than others.
Design and UX-wise, the current laptop market is a shitshow and Apple seems to be the only company that consistently cares about the little things. Sure, they've messed up in the past (butterfly keyboards), but there is still a sense of progress.
Fan noise is the same. I bought a machine from a Linux laptop vendor. At the time of purchase, I raised my concerns about the risk of ultimately ending up disappointed when it arrived (particularly how pricey it was). They insisted that I would be happy, and that it would be much better than my 5 year old laptop that I was replacing.
Not only was that not the case, it was worse than my own pessimism that I started with.
The fan noise and the trackpad were so bad to the point that it felt like a joke, even though I knew it wasn't. People are just oblivious to this stuff and march onward none the wiser, even the people who should be doing things like comparative analysis on quality against their competitors' products.
I bought a Vostro 5301 (13" with 11th gen intel cpu) and the fan ran All. The. Time.
I returned it after doing all the windows and driver updates, choosing "quiet mode" in the Dell Power Management software. The fan would kick on while cpu strolled along at 10 or 15%. Replaced it with an xps 13 which has been fine. (I have had several xps so decided to chance it).
I remember Wacom bragging about corporate secret quantitative measurement methodologies in Surface 3-4 era, but what completely solved pen computing stagnation was Microsoft dropping them completely and Apple Pencil casually stepping in, so,
I think it's got to be a little bit of both. My experience has been that the trackpad experience with Win10 on a MacBook is poor, and the trackpad experience on a hackintosh is also poor.
I realize a sibling poster had a different hackintosh experience. I think that maybe supports my suspicion. Good hardware and good software are both necessary, but not sufficient, conditions of a good overall experience.
I really don't get what is so special about all of these trackpad debates. Honestly if my trackpad can do a 2 finger scroll I'm happy. Worst trackpad I've used was on my x201, and was only terrible because it was tiny and insensitive.
It's very simple. Use an MBP for a few months, then switch back to another laptop and just see how long you last. I never used a trackpad at all until I got an MBP - always a mouse. Can't go back to that now. The one on MBP feels like a finely tuned instrument that does exactly what you mean it to do.
I'm a designer, and even on my work issued Macbook I had no issue using design programs like Sketch or Figma with the trackpad. It was really effortless and sometimes even after I got back to my desk where I had a mouse I'd still be using the trackpad for an hour after without even really realizing, it's that good.
It even feels amazing, physically. It's smooth and your finger just glides right over it and still registers the touch with barely any pressure. The combination of the hardware, the size, and the software (drivers, OS, whatever else) is just the best I've ever used. Best of all, it's like that right out of the box.
For laptops, at least, I'm solidly Apple for the trackpad alone, I like it that much.
Would you consider using one of the trackpads you're happy with INSTEAD of a mouse? For non-precision work, that is. Browsing, navigating an IDE, clicking around the OS, stuff like that. In an emergency anything that does a two finger scroll and registers a click is okay, but would you enjoy using it for eight hours every day? Apple will confidently sell you a $5000 desktop machine with just their trackpad, because it is that good.
> Apple will confidently sell you a $5000 desktop machine with just their trackpad, because it is that good.
I mean... Apple will also "confidently" sell you four little castor wheels for 700 quid[0]. I'm not sure we should view their eagerness to take money off you as a sign of how great they are.
The best trackpad I've used was on the Tegra K1-based Acer Chromebook 13. It had a good size for multi-touch gestures and was just really well integrated. Combined with a nice low-friction surface and a positive click, I still haven't found its equal.
In fact, that line of chromebooks had the best overall package. Slim, but very sturdy plastic body, a surprisingly good keyboard, ~10 hour battery life. The 13" FHD screen was OK, but not amazing, I would have liked an IPS panel instead of TN.
The major downside is that it was a 32-bit ARM-based chromebook and everyone was going 64-bit x86 instead. So it got slower and slower with each successive update, eventually it couldn't even play 1080p Youtube videos anymore, or even 720p60. Such a shame.
The hardware + software configuration for the majority of touchpads I've used on Chromebooks are on par or better than MacBook touchpads. It's just that people pretend they don't exist, whether in consumer complaints comparing MacBooks to everything else, or by the people responsible for freedesktop-based software who themselves continue purchasing terrible hardware and keep the software (drivers, userspace apps, etc) in the same sad state that it's always been in instead of copying what's happening with Chromebooks.
Look at Firefox for an example of the latter. I'm typing this on a Chromebook intended to run ChromeOS, but it's actually running Ubuntu. The touchpad experience from the factory is as good as it should be. When you wipe the machine and install Ubuntu and use Chrome, it's still pretty good. Running Firefox on the same system gives you its same janky scroll behavior that you get anywhere else that isn't a MacBook, for no good reason.
People act like there's some yet-to-be-understood law of nature that make MacBook touchpads good and everything else bad. This is demonstrably false. We have existence proofs to the contrary.
There are so many people responding with incredulity to the fact that pc laptop makers haven't come up with a good Trackpad, but to me the reason is evident in the first interaction you have with any pc laptop manufacturer. Show me a pc laptop website that isn't an absolute horrific fucking mess, then find me a product on that website that doesn't look like a stupid broken plastic box thing, and then maybe we can start talking about trackpads. These companies seemingly want people to buy arbitrary products off the shelf and NEVER return. I'll grant that there may be a few notable exceptions, probably Razer is one, but the rest are abominations.
I think that since they manufacture so many other touch devices that the software, data and or expertise in designing those devices transfers over into touchpads.
They invented good laptop design. Up until 2011, most laptops were shitty clones of the PowerBook Duo in terms of design. After 2011, most laptops became shitty clones of the MacBook Air.
It's funny that PC and Android can never reach the smoothness of Apple's touch pad and screen scroll when it's really the basic thing of computer usage where it matters.
Apple did it right 15 years ago and why do others still suck at it?
they don’t care. i’d love for someone to defend the idea that for all these years, microsoft has really wanted us to have first class touchpad experiences on their laptops, but they just couldn’t figure it out. A problem too hard, a bridge too far, an unattainable moonshot for however many hundreds of thousands of software engineers microsoft has employed over the years. so, once again, the reason it’s only that good on mac is because no one cares in the windows world, from microsoft to their developers and ultimately their customers who don’t value that feature. edit: i spend most of my life in linux but I have a mbp for photoshop and capture one. on many topics I hate my mac with a cold fury but credit where it’s due.
Am I really that unique in never having used the trackpad on a laptop at all, other than a last resort being forced to use some weird non-Lenovo thing without a nipple?
Always an external mouse in the backpack and the nipple as a fallback.
Where's the fanboyism in that?
They were commenting on a post about how most PC touchpads suck and that for some people a great touchpad is a requirement, the absence of which would prevent them from buying other laptops, such as the Framework Laptop.
> for some people a great touchpad is a requirement,
The touchpad. Nothing else. Just the touchpad?
I'm not given to hyperbole but methinks there's a lot of info and technical requirements that go into purchasing an expensive item such as a laptop. Screen size and quality, keyboard quality, ports, batter life, weight, performance, looks - oh you know...normal stuff.
At least for us normal people. Maybe my mistake was there.
A requirement, not THE [single] requirement. English isn't my first language but I believe that what I wrote is clear enough and you're playing dumb for some reason.
This is the best place to talk about that. There may be multiple suppliers of trackpads for the Framework and so they GP might finally have some choice.
The sad part is that it's not just a hardware problem. While most PC laptops have really terrible trackpad hardware, some do have pretty decent hardware. It's just that the software is still absolutely terrible. You can run Linux on a relatively modern Macbook, and the trackpad becomes terrible.
I'll be honest, I've used a laptop as a primary computing device my whole life - and I have no idea what a "sane touchpad" would even be. They really are so frequently bad that I can't imagine what a good one would be like. I mostly use PCs (often with Linux), but used a mac for work for while - and I can't really say I saw the appeal in that touchpad either. Besides issues that come from low-quality pads + linux drivers (ghost mouse movements as I type, stupid imprecision from weird acceleration setting) - I don't like the way that most touch pads feel cold and metallic, and how they always attract dust you can feel as you use.
My solution has always been to just keep a wireless mouse with rechargable AA's in my backpack. If I'm using my laptop on a couch at home, I have a wooden lap desk with ample mouse space to accommodate it.
Additionally, the thinkpad I have now has both an eraser mouse and touch screen + stylus (as well as a trackpad), so if I do have to leave my mouse at home, I at least have options. I like the eraser mouse because I don't have to move my fingers away from the keyboard - and even if it feels it takes slightly longer to move - it's more pleasant tactile experience for me.
I'm with you on this one. I just find them incredibly difficult to use long term, despite multiple years across the various Macs and PC laptops I've used.
I strongly suspect most of the complaints about PC trackpads are a bit like Windows/Linux/Mac users complaining about the current font rendering on any of the others. I can't help wondering how much is just personal preference + a bit of echo chamber.
Well actually, Win10 font rendering is broken, i.e. 1 and l look completely the same on Courier New on Win10, but not on Win7 ... there are years old bug reports (it broke in some feature update), but of course those have been ignored.
Yeah, the surface line seems to have quite-acceptable trackpads. I have an SP4, and the keyboard-cover's is... a bit strange to the touch (highly textured), but works reliably.
Unlike so many other brands. The vast majority I've used have been an endless stream of frustration and flakiness.
I have an SP4 as well and enjoyed the touchpad on it. I don't think it is as good as the macbook one, but the surface makes up for this with the touch screen. I would often mix it up between screen and touchpad touches to navigate and I miss it now I am using a macbook.
Yea, I'm not actually all that fond of the SP4, but it has utterly convinced me that touchpad + touchscreen is massively superior to either one alone. It's so natural feeling.
I’ve never understood why people⁰ care so much about trackpads. For working with text (including code) keyboards are better, and for gaming mice are better. Where I'm less sure is graphics and video, but it seems to me like specialized mice, graphics tablets, and other tools (eg. https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/davinciresolve/key... and https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/davinciresolve/pan...) are better. The only thing trackpads seem good at is browsing¹, which IMO should be a slightly glorified text task where Pentadacyl/luakit/qutebrowser/etc.² vi-style keybindings³ are best.
Edits to respond:
My point is that most tasks are either ① best done in a good text editing / development environment that works well with a specialized text input device — a keyboard — or ② would be better done with a specialized non-keyboard, non-trackpad input device (eg. a gaming mouse, graphics tablet, etc.)
⁰especially here on HN
¹including scrolling through PDFs and other documents ²or Zathura or less ³and/or/including PageUp/Down, Home, and End on luxurious large keyboards. Space and Shift+Space are okay on smaller ones.
my point is that most tasks are either ① best done in a good text editing / development environment
Your point is only correct if you replace the word "most" with "my." The fact that trackpads are hugely popular indicates that your needs are not typical, and you should not impose your choices upon others with different needs.
would be better done with a specialized non-keyboard, non-trackpad input device
Show me a better multi-purpose input device that I can use to rotate objects on a screen. Or zoom into a specific object without affecting other objects on a screen. Or configure to have multiple hotspots that when tapped can trigger events or macros.
Again, trackpads aren't your thing. Good for you. Other people love them, and millions of people get real work done on them each day.
> Show me a better multi-purpose input device that I can use to rotate objects on a screen. Or zoom into a specific object without affecting other objects on a screen.
I agree with you in general, but a trackpad is in fact really, truly horrible for these tasks. As humans we are designed to rotate objects precisely, and that design does not involve using two fingers to slide about arbitrary locations on a flat plane. It involves grasping and rotating with the hand. For rotating and/or zooming, a large knob attached to a high-resolution encoder would be a million times better.
I think you missed the goal of the multi-purpose requirement. Proselytizing custom input controls for every possible task on a portable device is...weird.
I also liked the dedicated scroll wheel on MS Office-themed keyboards. They might have gone overboard with the clipboard control buttons, but the wheel felt reasonable.
If you haven't looked at them before take a look at 3D mice. Commonly used in 3D modeling and CAD drafting they are the best at interacting with items in 3D space but I wouldn't actually like one for text/flat image interaction. Mapping 3D movements to a flat plane is less intuitive than it may seem if you haven't done it. Most the 3D professionals I know use a touchpad or regular mouse for 99% of the non-3D usage.
How about a little sphere or oriented volume that magnetically levitates out of its cubby when the device is powered on -- and maybe the field could be varied to simulate different amounts of resistance ...
I actually buy this conclusion for this use case, but in fairness the debate was "keyboard vs touchpad". So touchscreen > touchpad > keyboard for rotating objects. But for other things, having to reach up to the screen (e.g., scrolling), is worse than touchpad. With a trackpad, I only have to articulate my wrist while my arm remains resting on the surface; with a touch screen, I have to lift my whole arm and articulate my shoulder and elbow if not also my wrist.
I didn’t mean for it to be that exclusively. I tried to say that keyboards are the best text input device, but gaming mice and controllers are the best gaming input device, graphics tablets are the best graphics input device, and video editing input devices like the ones I linked in my original comment are probably best for video editing (while trackpads are at best decent scrolling/browsing devices, but IMHO I personally prefer keyboard scrolling like in the terminal pager less, the PDF and other document viewer Zathura, and vi-inspired browsers/browser plugins like luakit, qutebrowser, and Pentadactyl).
I find the mouse better for zooming (scroll wheel) and rotating (click and drag). Second to that, for less articulate but quick performance of same task, using the touch screen to rotate and drag in the same way you would on a track pad but actually interacting with the imagery directly. The laptop keyboard and trackpad combo is fine, but to me they’re merely a convenience until I can get back to a “real” keyboard and a mouse. It’s not uncommon for me to spend hours using the laptop’s HIDs directly, but I don’t think it’s very ergo, and definitely not as productive as a full desktop setup. External trackpads don’t sell well for a reason - simply that if you have the desk space for one, almost everyone is better served by a good quality mouse.
>Your point is only correct if you replace the word "most" with "my." The fact that trackpads are hugely popular indicates that your needs are not typical, and you should not impose your choices upon others with different needs.
But Apple trackpads are not hugely popular, they have a fraction (~10%, likely less) of the global market. Does the fact that non-Apple computers are hugely popular indicate that the needs of Apple trackpad fans are not typical, and they should not extol their virtues to others?
> Show me a better multi-purpose input device that I can use to rotate objects on a screen. Or zoom into a specific object without affecting other objects on a screen. Or configure to have multiple hotspots that when tapped can trigger events or macros.
I’ve previously used a normal Apple mouse and keyboard to do all of these things in Adobe Photoshoshop and Illustrator on macOS and subsequently a random BestBuy mouse and ancient Compaq keyboard to do them in Gimp, Inkscape, and Blender on GNU (with xdotool for hot corners, which I’m counting as close enough to tapping hotspots). A graphics tablet would only work better.
> Again, trackpads aren't your thing. Good for you. Other people love them, and millions of people get real work done on them each day.
Again, non-Apple trackpads don’t seem to be your thing. Good for you. The majority of trackpad users use them every day.
You... you do realize that you can’t order a PC laptop with a Mac trackpad, right? No one is like, “I could have the Mac trackpad for the same cost, but I prefer the stuttery trackpad that moves the cursor and selects shit when my palm gets too close”.
> You... you do realize that you can’t order a PC laptop with a Mac trackpad, right?
You can as long as you can order x86 Macs with Bootcamp.
> No one is like, “I could have the Mac trackpad for the same cost, but I prefer the stuttery trackpad that moves the cursor and selects bleep when my palm gets too close”.
No, but there are plenty of people who think “I prefer no trackpad to accidentally swipe [—even if palm rejection is perfect, I want total hand —including finger— rejection—] at all”, from people who buy Macs and use the setting Apple provides to disable the trackpad when mice are plugged in, to people who use their Mac as a PC laptop and manually disable the trackpad (https://www.lakshmikanth.com/how-to-disable-trackpad-on-boot...), to people who try to more permanently disconnect broken old Mac trackpads (https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/386625/macbook-pro...), to people who physically disconnect their trackpads, to people who buy old thinkpads because eg. at least some x200s have only a trackpoint and fingerprint sensor.
It seems like you've moved the goalposts from your original claim/implication that non-Mac trackpads are more popular to "not everyone likes trackpads". As far as I know, no one has argued that everyone likes trackpads?
My implication was that the fact that many people use trackpads doesn’t somehow prove that trackpads are a good tool (as reaperducer seemed to imply) (despite the fact that people can’t easily get laptops without them) any more than the fact that many people use non-Apple trackpads somehow proves that non-Apple trackpads are better (despite the fact that many people can’t easily get laptops they like without them).
I’ve previously used a normal Apple Magic mouse and keyboard to do all of these things
If you've used a Magic Mouse, then you've used a mouse with a trackpad on its back. Glad you liked it!
And no, rotating in Photoshop with the keyboard isn't the same as rotating with a trackpad. It's an entirely different process that is significantly less efficient, unless you already know the exact angle of rotation you want down to the 0.1°.
> If you've used a Magic Mouse, then you've used a mouse with a trackpad on its back. Glad you liked it!
My mistake. I used a standard Apple mouse (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Mighty_Mouse). I used its clickable scroll ball and squeeze functionality and suspect I would dislike the Magic mouse.
> And no, rotating in Photoshop with the keyboard isn't the same as rotating with a trackpad. It's an entirely different process that is significantly less efficient, unless you already know the exact angle of rotation you want down to the 0.1°.
IMO the ideal mouse + keyboard rotation style is Blender’s, which is more efficient in this scenario than a trackpad. But I still believe a graphics tablet would be objectively superior.
Have three graphics tablets, while they are FAR superior for art work they are not at all better for rotation. In fact I use blender on Mac and regularly use the trackpad to zoom and rotate because it's far more precise. Similar for 2D drawing, my favorite 2D environment is the iPad Pro and Apple Pencil. I still rotate with two finger gestures.
> But Apple trackpads are not hugely popular, they have a fraction (~10%, likely less) of the global market.
The person you're replying to said "trackpads are popular" with no mention of Apple. Your entire argument so far has been against trackpads in general. Why shift goalposts?
Is it even called a "trackpad" outside of Apple machines? I'm pretty sure they're called "touchpads" generally. So maybe "trackpad" is inherently referent to Apple.
I gave you data by showing links where other companies like Blackberry, Lenovo, Microsoft, and Asus use the word "trackpad" themselves for their own devices. Lenovo even cutely capitalizes the P to fit their ThinkPad branding. You could also google around and see random people on reddit and elsewhere talking about the "trackpads" on their dells, hps, vaios, matebooks, and so on.
I'm not saying that "touchpad" isn't more common, but the evidence _clearly_ shows that "trackpad" isn't exclusive to Apple devices.
The comment I was replying to was ~⅔ quasi argumentum ad populum. So I replied to their quasi argumentum ad populum with examples of it applied to the broader context of the thread, including the comment I originally replied to, and replied to their other argument with counterpoints both with and without Apple hardware.
In my day job I'm constantly reading PDFs. Being able to zoom in/out, scroll, and move the cursor with such low effort can even bring me a little bit of joy. It's not really about what is most efficient. Computing should feel good. That's why it's hard for me to move away from Apple's trackpads.
is a good description of what I feel reading PDFs efficiently, near effortlessly (which to me is near the same thing), and comfortably (also similar in that it involves minimal reaching, but also includes automatic semi-smart dark theming, easy good zooming, etc.) with Zathura.
> I’ve never understood why people⁰ care so much about trackpads. ... would be better done with a specialized non-keyboard, non-trackpad input device
So you want a specialized input devices for every task on a mobile device. That's an interesting choice. And I guess you also want to carry all these specialized devices around with you?
> browsing¹, which IMO should be a slightly glorified text task where Pentadacyl/luakit/qutebrowser/etc.² vi-style keybindings³ are best
Ok. Say you see a headline on HN that looks interesting, and you go to click on it. Wait, no, you...uhh...tab tab tab tab tab over to it and press enter to go to the comments page (like we all do) and start reading the comments. And, oh look, you want to respond to one of them. So you...uhh...tab tab...uhh...tab...tab tab tab tab tab tab tab...tab tab? Or you could just point and click.
Your proposed critical tasks of shifting the viewport and appending text to the current cursor location meet approximately 0% of computing user needs. The vast majority of all computer interaction is putting the cursor in the right place in the first place. The keyboard is terrible for that, external devices encumber portability, vertical touch screens require significant muscle control and effort, and trackpoints drift and do fewer things while being worse at all of them.
Please take a minute to type the name of any of the browsers I named into your favourite search engine or package manager and return when you know what we’re talking about. (This comment was made via Pentadactyl).
> The vast majority of all computer interaction is putting the cursor in the right place in the first place.
This is why it pains me to use browsers where I can’t tap [count]gi to focus input fields.
Enlighten us all. What exactly did you press and what mental decision and awareness process was required to do it starting from the front page?
> [count]gi
"[count]" sounds like one would need to know how many like things on the page precede the thing you're trying to get to. Thanks but no thanks. 150! Oops, 100! Oops, 130!
Pretty much everything clickable gets tagged. Buttons, text inputs, links, etc. If what you want to click on has a word in it, you can press '/' and type the word then hit enter to click it so that would probably be what I would do if there was ever a missing tag. That's also how you can highlight text. This is for vimium at least.
In Tridactyl, you just push f, which allocates each key on the keyboard to a visible link on the screen. So to reply to your comment, the keystrokes were
and a lot easier- not to mention, less RSI-inducing- than mucking around with a mouse, or trackpad, or trackpoint, trying to aim a little cursor at a little box multiple times in a row.
f20 selects this discussion (the 20th link), but I used f4<Enter> to select threads (the 4th link); j,D, and <Space> scroll down by a line, half-screen/page and full-screen/page respectively; fr4 selects the correct reply (the fourth link whose text begins with r); gi goes to the first input field and enters insert mode.
In insert mode I may use the simple mixture of emacs/readline and CUA bindings — like ^w to wipe the last word, ^a to go to the beggining of the line and ^e to go to the end (eg. when inserting a > before a blockquote, then appending my commentary) — to write a straightforward comment from beginning to end, or I may use ^i to pop the field open in my $EDITOR (vis), where motions like m to mark my place, G to go to the end, o to open a new line, and M to return to my mark are useful for comments that might be written non-linearly, eg. if they have footnotes. I can save and exit vis (if I use it) with ZZ, and submit the comment with standard CUA <Tab><Enter>.
If I reference any other material then Pentadactyl’s browsing bindings like go«character» to open a quickmark, s to search, p or P to paste my X11 primary selection as a search term or the url of a current or new tab, b to fast-as-you-type search through tabs, y to yank the current website, ;y«number and/or title of link to yank» and d to delete a tab are useful (along with standard X11 Shift+Insert to paste the primary selection in insert mode).
Ideally though, I should use Pentadactyl only for browsing — for scrolling through and reading web documents — and have a dedicated newsreader that understands what posts, comments, etc. are and could make this several times more efficient. I’m currently dipping my toes in evil-mode emacs, which should enable this. I’ve recently spent less time on HN and more on IRC where I do have a dedicated native client that makes things orders of magnitude more smooth than trying to use a web client in my browser.
Now I can't tell if this thread is meant to be satire.
> f20 selects this discussion (the 20th link) but I used f4<Enter> to select threads (the 4th link)
So first you have to visually recognize every link in between the beginning and what you want to choose and then you have to count them all? I hope you don't miscount!
> j,D, and <Space> scroll down by a line, half-screen/page and full-screen/page respectively
How many lines, half-pages, or pages is it from the top to here? Just curious.
> fr4 selects the correct reply (the fourth link whose text begins with r);
So first you have to decide that "starts with r" is a good heuristic for getting where you want to go and then you have to find all of the links that start with r and count them?
> gi goes to the first input field and enters insert mode
But if it's not the first input field, then you have to count them or cycle through them?
> Ideally though, I should have a dedicated newsreader that understands what posts, comments, etc. are
So now you want a special bespoke reader for every website?
Oh yes this all sounds so much easier than just pointing at the thing you want! Thank you for clarifying.
I believe every single statement in your comment is factually false. The only one I don’t feel objectively certain of is this:
> Just curious.
But I sincerely doubt it’s true based on the tone of your comment. I’m willing to walk through each sentence with you, but as I have already sunk significant time into trying to help you I politely request that you first prove my doubt unfounded by investing five minutes in grabbing luakit, qutebrowser, or Pentadactyl — or at the very least a WebExtension attempt at emulating them like SurfingKeys — with your favorite package manager/browser and trying it out for yourself.
Edit: However I will walk through the sentences for the sake of the other people reading this thread in better faith, to respond to the strongest [weakly] plausible interpretation of your comment, although text is a worse medium for learning GUIs than video which is worse than first hand interactive use.
> So first you have to visually recognize every link in between the beginning and what you want to choose and then you have to count them all? I hope you don't miscount!
No, the browser automatically highlights them in a style of your choice (I use a gruvbox theme) and visually numbers them for you. You can also just begin typing any part of the link’s title and it will be selected when you’ve typed a subset unique to it.
> How many lines, half-pages, or pages is it from the top to here? Just curious.
~3 out of 4 screens on my threads right now. But note that I scrolled down one piece at a time and only know this because my bottom status bar happens to display it (as well as the url, mode, a minus or plus signifying pages back or forward in the tab’s history, on a background that signifies the SSL status of the site).
> So first you have to decide that "starts with r" is a good heuristic for getting where you want to go and then you have to find all of the links that start with r and count them?
No, you don’t need to use a heuristic but it saves reaching your left hand to the number row to eliminate half a dozen links by typing fr instead of just typing f10.
> But if it's not the first input field, then you have to count them or cycle through them?
No, you can use ;i to select fields the same way you select links, but it hasn’t taken me the months I’ve been using HN to notice all top-level discussion pages have exactly 2 input fields: one to add a top-level comment and one for the Algolia search (gi or 2gi will instantly teleport you to and insert you cursor in the first or second one respectively).
> So now you want a special bespoke reader for every website?
No, I want a native client for each type of software: a browser for browsing (exploring and reading) web documents, a news reader for news, an IRC client for internet real-time chat, a mail client for mail, a media player for playing media (I copy links and use a sxhkd binding to open them in MPV — https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24509028), etc.
I’m using a different plugin (I think it’s vimkeys) which is also great. I wanted to give the pentadactyl a try, but it looks like it’s discontinued- the latest release was in 2014. Am I looking in a wrong place?
The development¹ has been continued by the community after Firefox removed support for XUL extensions.
¹Well, tbh basic maintenance is a more accurate term — the updates have been minor, and the patch that enables it in the latest version of Palemoon hasn’t been pushed to the addon store yet, you have to clone from master at the moment.
> I’ve never understood why people care so much about trackpads.
Because most people don't use vim and mice aren't usable unless you're sitting at a flat surface with the room to hold one. If I'm using my laptop on the couch, a trackpad is probably the best solution. (Trackpoint gave my index finger RSI, when I was was being careful.)
> mice aren't usable unless you're sitting at a flat surface with the room to hold one
Trackball mice a good solution to this problem. I had work on a bed without a table for 2 weeks last year, and a trackball mouse ended up working great (I didn't like using the trackpad, since switching from the keyboard to trackpad on a laptop is fairly uncomfortable if you do it often enough).
Trackball mice are thick, and inevitably got schmutz in the bearings and got slow. Then you'd have to open them up and clean them out.
Trackpads were a great upgrade to laptops when they happened, even though at the time, excessive moisture screwed up the trackpad, to the point that I needed to have a dime handy to put my finger on for a half hour after getting out of the shower.
(Source: I've used mac portables since the PB 100, including most of the major versions)
> a trackball mouse ended up working great (I didn't like using the trackpad, since switching from the keyboard to trackpad on a laptop is fairly uncomfortable
Switching from the keyboard to something an inch away is uncomfortable for you, but switching from the keyboard to something a foot away is not? I don't get it.
Moving to the mouse is a movement where the distance from my hand to the body stays the same, while moving to the trackpad is a movement where I need to being my hand closer. For whatever reason, I find the second easier.
Additionally, when I'm using it on my lap, the trackpad is basically next to my body, which makes my wrist position a little uncomfortable.
Looking back, I think it's not really the switching, but rather the comfort when using one for a prolonged period, for which I found the trackball easier.
I find that the larger trackpads on newer macbooks help with this a lot because the upper right corner of the pad is easily accessible at exactly the same angle of inward rotation by just pulling your elbow back along the side of your body. The Apple magic, I guess, is being able to have that without constant phantom palm touches.
We used to have a far better solution for that, the pointer stick on Dell and IBM laptops. Direct control over the cursor without abrading your sweaty dirty finger skin over a frictive surface.
I've been a Trackpoint addict for over 20 years, using computers 8+ hours a day. I wouldn't consider any other pointer method. Trackpoint drift is an issue, but it's not really a big problem. A few times a month, it happens for a few seconds, then it works itself out. I have had episodes of cramping, but they've gone away with no long term impact.
It may be that I've become more zen/accepting, because I'm sure a mouse or trackpad can be more precise pointing tools, but it's worth it for the connection. Input is all about the keyboard and mouse, and the proximity just makes so much sense, especially when using vim mode. I could imagine better systems where typing with a keyboard is still the main input, but they would all involve not taking my hands off the home row.
Funny, because I see people complaining about it still in 2020 on brand new Thinkpads. See for instance https://www.reddit.com/r/thinkpad/comments/ken18b/does_your_... and the comments saying "They all drift, it's inherent by the sensor design", "It drifts on all my ThinkPads too", "Mine sometimes drifts".
So unless your definition of modern is "ones that haven't been released yet", I think you might be wrong.
Agree that efficient development (regardless of IDE/editor) is done best using primarily keyboard.
Also agree that detached keyboards and mice will almost always be superior to their on-board counterparts.
But, I think we're being a wee bit cognitively dissonant if we tell ourselves notebook keyboards and trackpads don't receive a non-trivial amount of use--even from the best of us.
Even more, why are keyboard and external-mouse purists even bothered with even owning a laptop if they rarely/ever intend to use the most major distinguishing features that separate them from desktops in the first place?
But even if you don't agree with any of that, why shouldn't we still demand a damn-good version of a highly ubiquitous tool, even if we don't personally use it that often? (Especially since Apple has proven that it's possible.) On HN (and the rest of the dev community) are perhaps the most demanding critics of anything technology. "Server starts up 8% slower!--dogshit!" "New release consumes 5% more memory--are you kidding me!" "Battery lasts 25m shorter--I'm in tears!" "The new theme is highly disruptive to my workflow--OH THE HUMANITY."
I'm not being critical of our being sticklers. We should be! That's our job! Our fellow devs care about quality; our users care about quality. We should care about what our users care about. We have the voices and power to advocate for good products for all that use technology. The trackpad will be a major way people interact with computers for a long time to come and I'm not prepared to hand-wave away the mediocre.
> I’ve never understood why people⁰ care so much about trackpads.
Because it's nice to be able to use my laptop without having to find a tabletop and dig out my mouse. In bed, on the couch, on a bus, as a passenger in a car.
Smartphones have taken over a lot of those situations, but a small laptop is still much better for a lot of tasks. I don't use Macs anymore, but their touchpads are actually as precise as a good mouse, and it just feels really nice.
Same thing with knobs and graphics tablets, though it's not a use case I have personally. A dedicated peripheral is probably more powerful and precise, but sometimes it's nice to use your laptop from your lap.
I had the same opinion until I used a MacBook. The trackpad works beautifully, the gestures make sense. It’s close to perfect. Even while on a docking station at my work desk I either the MacBook trackpad or the Magic Trackpad.
A friend of mine is a professional photographer, he is using his trackpad to process and edit his pictures. Hundreds of them per session. And it's not like he can't afford a mouse or even specialized hardware.
And having tried Apple touchpads, they are actually good, so much that they released a standalone version for desktop computers. On every PC I have tried, at best, they provide you with a pointing device in case using a mouse is impractical. I don't intend to buy a Mac for several reason but I have to admit that their trackpads are not in the same league.
Use your thumbs. The track pad is right below the space bar.
Or, it's close enough that with hovering hands you can move back and forth between keys without looking. It's much faster to navigate a code base that way, I think, than trying to jump in vim lines at a time. A smooth, continuous scroll at easily controllable, different speeds does wonders for keeping continuity of a file in mind.
This is why I like having not just ^f/b full page, {}() paragraph and sentence, and of course j/k line scrolling but also ^u/d half-page scrolling so much that I mapped them it U and D in Zathura and Pentadactyl just for the centimeter of finger movement that saves.
{} are approximately as far but they’re in the same direction that your fingers naturally point. () are farther but as words in the languages of vi and vim they're a powerful operator that have no mouse equivalent (unlike w[ords] and {} paragraphs/lines which have double-click and triple-click). Editing the middle of a sentence, then deciding to move it to a footnote is IMO easier with `<Esc>di(}p` or `<Esc>di(Gp`¹ than with `bend thumb/wrist backwards / arm up and to the right, drag thumb to end of sentence, double-click drag to select one word at a time to the other end, release and drag sentence down precise number of lines to next paragraph or all the way to the end of the document (or how I would move the selection, Backspace, PageDown to the end, Shift+Insert)"
¹Let me test that. I like digraphs a heck of a lot more than scrolling through a symbol list btw. This was also a nice use for marks.
Not sure what you're confused about - your hand can hover over the keyboard and trackpad at the same time - they're right next to each other. I don't need to move my hands to go from one to another?
¿Por que no los dos? Seriously, I wasn't talking about replacing my keyboard with a trackpad. They are different devices with different purposes and are intended to be used together.
When done right, they're wonderful. When done wrong, you end up creating custom keybindings to augment your workflow and lug a mouse around when that doesn't cut it. I've never seen a PC laptop do it right.
XPS trackpads have always been number one, from the very beginning. I'm working with a 10 year old laptop and its trackpad has performed flawlessly and is superior to any MacBook I've ever used (but especially older ones).
My XPS has the advantage of two physical buttons for left and right click. They require just the right amount of force to press (like a slightly softer mouse button with deeper travel). It makes dragging things around (which I do a lot because I don't use a tiling window manager) very easy. Which doesn't feel like something I should have to comment on, but doing this on a MacBook is pure suffering. Trying to hold down the giant button (which takes quite a bit of force) while trying to drag your finger... ugh. It's miserable. Because of the physical buttons I can actually play some games on my XPS without needing an external mouse (or putting up with misclicks)
In terms of hardware, what people are looking for is mostly surface feel, size, features. It's the former where cheap laptops fall down. Most of the ones I've used really suck, actually. Some of them are bad enough that the manufacturers actually texture the surface to try to slow your finger down, I guess because the accuracy of the touchpad isn't very good. High end touchpads like the one on the XPS or MacBooks have flawless feel: extremely low friction surfaces.
It's not commonly noticed, but software contributes at least as much to how a trackpad feels as hardware. Given the limitations of its hardware, I have no quarrel with Apple's software quality. (Though the defaults are weird, like not being able to tap-to-click. They really want you to have to use that damn button.)
Windows has historically sucked at this. I've seen about half a dozen trackpads that seemed absolutely terrible, and no Windows settings could make them better. After moving them over to Linux (on the synaptics driver) they suddenly became quite okay to use, even if the hardware was crappy. I'm afraid this era might be ending, sadly. I've had nothing but bad experiences with libinput. It lacks the kind of configurability you need to improve on the performance of a bad touchpad. (It's even quite bad under Wayland for the XPS touchpad - you can't set the combination of low speed, high acceleration that feels natural to me for this touchpad.)
> Trying to hold down the giant button (which takes quite a bit of force) while trying to drag your finger... ugh. It's miserable.
Not wishing to detract from your personal experience but "quite a bit of force" is at odds to mine - on this M1 MBP, it takes less force to activate the trackpad click than it does to activate a keypress. And once you've clicked, you can use a second figure to drag; no need to try and drag with the force finger (I use my thumb to click for power*, then index to drag for accuracy.)
Another comment regarding the click and drag behavior.
One thing I would definitely expect a recent migrant to apple trackpads to experience as negative would be "force click". The apple trackpads sense force in some analogue way and if you push hard enough you can activate another action called force click. It's ridiculously easy to activate on accident when holding click while dragging -- but this "feature" can be turned off (and probably should be for most people I'd wager).
I've never tried using the middle finger for dragging -- seems awkward but i'll give it a try ... won't that activate the two finger drag operation?
Yes, your point is entirely fair. I should have clarified that I was talking about an older (mid decade) MacBook Pro. It requires enough force that, with my arm just positioned normally, I can actually feel the torque applied down the whole of my forearm.
My understanding is that Apple has made the clicks much lighter in their later models - along with doing the exact same thing with the keyboard keys, which for me goes much to far in the other direction.
The latest iterations as I understand are like this:
- keyboards were reverted similar to how they were around 2015.
- all the new trackpads are don’t require a physical actuation to activate. You can apply the same amount of minimal pressure anywhere on the trackpad and it “presses back” at you to simulate a physical click. It’s quite convincing.
AFAIK the button doesn't actually move, it's like the home button on some older iPhones (like the 7). It detects the pressure and has a haptic feedback to make it feel like a button. If you look at a powered off iphone 7, the button is just an indent on the otherwise fixed glass panel.
Exactly. The most impressive part is that it really feels like a click, down to the illusion it's moving down (but it's not, at all). When powering off (or there's a crash), the feeling of it being immovable is surreal. Plus the surface is suddenly responding evenly (the clicking ones had a hinged design, so it became increasingly hard to click upwards the surface)
One can leverage the haptic feedback to make the TouchBar a bit more lively[0]. The illusion breaks a bit since the haptic device is farther away from the touch surface but it's still quite a transformative experience for the TB.
As you say, the default mac os touchpad settings are somewhat strange to me.
But the touchpad can be configured for the bottom side of the touchpad to function as buttons: if you touch it directly, it won't register as mouse movement. If you press on the left, it's a left button, right is a right button. So while not actual physical buttons, it's pretty damn close. I don't actually use this so not sure houw this would work out in practice for your needs.
Regarding the dragging situation, there's another setting that's now been buried in "Accessibility" for some reason, but that was present in the touchpad settings before: "drag hold".
This allows you to lift the finger from the touchpad for a brief period while dragging without stopping the dragging. This, to me, is the pinnacle of touchpad experience. You can start dragging wherever you want on the pad and go as far as you like, you never run out of space.
There's also a similar option that some people like: three-finger drag. It works like scrolling, except that if you use three fingers it starts dragging.
In terms of hardware, IMO my XPS 15's trackpad is superior to my MacBook Pro's trackpad. The gesture support from the OS obviously isn't as good, but the XPS sure does feel better to use.
Honestly, my xps is the only laptop that comes close to my macbooks... Yo be fair, the touch screen and pen on the XPS blow away the ones on the Macbook.
Yeah, I'm not sure about any of this, I grew up with PC trackpads, used them on Linux all the time and other than a few annoyances with accidentally tripping the trackpad when typing, never had a problem with them. The Macbook actually took quite a bit of time to get used to and many settings had to be adjusted (looking at you backwards scrolling).
In fact, I think I like the trackpad on my cheap Logitech K400 just as much as the Macbook, I'd be hard pressed to point to a significant problem with either.
Do you use gestures at all? I have both a MacBook Pro (for work) and a Logitech K400+. Two-finger scrolling on the MBP is fine; light pressure on the touchpad is enough to scroll very smoothly. Two-finger scrolling on my X230 is also fine, if a bit jumpy - I can at least keep my place while I'm scrolling, and it still takes only light pressure to recognize the gesture.
Two-finger scrolling on the K400+ is painful. (Actually physically painful; I have RSI in my right arm and poorly-tracking touchpads can be a trigger.) It requires fairly heavy pressure on the touchpad to trigger gestures consistently (though they can be triggered inconsistently with light pressure which is also frustrating). And especially on macOS, it's difficult to actually scroll a consistent distance with a two-finger gesture with the K400+.
I'm fairly certain this has to do with the K400+'s touchpad not being recognized as a touchpad by the OS. The device is instead emitting mouse wheel events in firmware when a two-finger scroll gesture is detected. macOS will then, of course, apply mouse wheel acceleration, which makes sense for some mice but absolutely does not make sense for a touchpad.
Definitely felt the same way moving from MacBook Air to XPS (under linux), but eventually I found the right settings to completely remove accidental touches on the pad while typing and since then, pretty good, not bad, can’t complain. Cause actually, all them track pads are about the same.
My Dell Precision 7750 touchpad works flawlessly and I'm running Ubuntu. The touchpad is optimal size, similar to that of Apple's I think. It also has 3 physical buttons, middle click is my favorite which by default is configured to open a link in a new tab. Multipoint touch and gestures work fine as well, at least those that I use - two finger touch for right click menu and two finger gesture for scrolling. Because it's a rather new touchpad by Dell, Initially the physical right button didn't work, which was a bit annoying, but eventually the problem was solved with kernel update.
I honestly don't know how people use PC laptops without an external mouse. It's incredible that the trackpads are still so bad. Can you spend a ton of money on a PC laptop and get a decent one? I have assumed it has been an issue with just using cheap parts, and it being hard to get people to pay for premium parts on PC laptops.
They aren’t that bad, let’s be real. Try the latest XPS 13, the trackpad is more than fine. Maybe not Apple great, but it’s perfectly fine. I could point to earlier makes/models that were fine too. It’s not going to make or break your decision on PC/Mac if you have Apple money to spend on a PC.
Use the keyboard predominantly instead of the trackpad and problem mitigated ;)
I've been using Linux exclusively on ~5 different laptops of varying quality the last few years and I haven't been able to relate to the frequent comments about trackpad support being poor - not sure if it's just I don't use it that much, or don't realize what I'm missing since I haven't used a modern macbook.
My biggest gripe applies to all laptops and that's the insufficient ram offered on most models - IMO 16gb should be the baseline, and 32gb approaching normal with the demands of current software (yes software could be more efficient but this isn't the reality we find ourselves in)
>don't realize what I'm missing since I haven't used a modern macbook
That's what I thought as well, but every time I try to use my colleagues Mac it's a struggle, movement speed is really weird as it's not linear, tapping doesn't behave as one would expect (never had a problem with Linux or even windows with that). The whole thing is a weird button which presses when I don't want to.
True, I have used it maybe for 10 mins in total in.my life, so that's probably the main issue (I hope for the sake of the people who actually use it).
On the other hand I have seen long time users and it makes me cringe. What a pain, learn some shortcuts and use it for random text selection only.
> movement speed is really weird as it's not linear,
It really shouldn't be linear. That would force you to make unnecessary tradeoffs between precision and the ability to get the cursor from one side of the screen to the other in just one or two swipes.
> tapping doesn't behave as one would expect (never had a problem with Linux or even windows with that). The whole thing is a weird button which presses when I don't want to.
Tap to click is an option that can be toggled on and off, on every trackpad I've ever used. Additionally, Apple trackpads since 2015 let you adjust in software the amount of force required for a press on the trackpad to register as a click.
> What a pain, learn some shortcuts and use it for random text selection only.
I can just as easily turn this around: configure and learn a few multi-touch gestures and you won't have to keep moving your hand off the trackpad to perform keyboard shortcuts.
I've used both (albeit the Mac was a 2010 Macbook Pro so they may have changed - the Dell is a 2019 XPS13 and is my current travel laptop) and I'd rate them roughly on par. The Macbook had slightly better accidental touch rejection iirc (eg. if you brush the touchpad while reaching for the keys to type) and slightly nicer build quality. The XPS is really nice though.
This does not look like a pathway to reduce the cost of your laptop by throwing out junk you don’t need. This looks like every part will be more expensive due to the focus on sustainable materials, e-waste and modularization. If you’re price-focused, are you really willing to pay a premium for ethical sourcing and repairability on the subset of components you want to populate your laptop with?
Hmm, not that it's "something you don't need", per se, but
> 4TB or more of Gen4 NVMe storage
Suggests to me that this will be targeted at the "money is no object" market. (And it might still be something you don't need, I keep all my media on a server, so 1TB would be more than sufficient, thank you very much.)
