4 ms·
Ask HN: Bad touchpads – hardware or software?
Why are typical laptop touchpads so lousy, compared to those in Macbooks? Is it the cheap (i.e. less capable) hardware? That wouldn't make sense to me: when you pay hundreds of dollars for a laptop, you'd be happy to pay a few (dozen?) dollars more for a quality touchpad and the manufacturers should know that.
Or is it the software - as in patents that prevent the manufacturers from offering the same smooth gestures with their drivers/software?
Anyone have an authoritative explanation?
- PaulHoule 9y agoI'd rather save the dozen dollars and spend it on a mouse.
- tqh 9y agoIt's mostly about bandwidth depending on how the device is connected inside the computer (usb is much better than ps/2 or serial), polling frequency, and software filtering raw data properly (duplicates and such). Some improvements https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/c774326a219536ab615d68a22875673f6f608b62 https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/c774326a219536ab615...