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No, it's because Apple's touchpad hardware is superior, and the industry benchmark. I say this grudgingly. I have given up on Apple's laptops for a host of rea

by yaseer 8y ago

No, it's because Apple's touchpad hardware is superior, and the industry benchmark. I say this grudgingly. I have given up on Apple's laptops for a host of reasons. The touchpad is the main thing I miss. It's not a question of a driver update. The perfect precision of their touchpad hardware has not (yet) been matched.

seba_dos1 8y ago
It really isn't. I'm a GNU/Linux user, but I have access to a Macbook and, what's more, have the Magic Trackpad 2 right in front of me. It's just a regular touchpad hardware, comparable to one in my Lenovo laptop, but with "force touch" - which if you don't care about silent clicking is just a gimmick that doesn't make much of a difference. (if you do care about not making clicking noise without having to "tap", then well, it is somewhat exceptional - that's why I own it) The "secret sauce" is simply in the application support for gestures. Even the driver isn't that exceptional (just well tuned), it's all toolkit and app support. On GNU/Linux you have several ways to support multitouch gestures, but all of them work as simple triggers - a completely different experience that what software on macOS usually provides.
- yaseer 8y ago
  Unless we come up with some objective criteria to compare touchpads, this may be a subjective judgement. Nevertheless, there are a large volume of people who subjectively believe Apple's touchpads 'feel' better and more precise, beyond just multi touch gestures. You could compare it to the handling of a car. There is some consensus luxury cars feel better to drive.
  - seba_dos1 8y ago
    From what I gathered, it's actually another thing: there is a large volume of people using misconfigured or simply bad software with their perfectly fine hardware touchpads. Apple ones, that are actually well configured out-of-the-box, then "feel" better and more precise, and clueless people incorrectly blame their hardware for sub-par experience. Been there, done that. I've blamed a touchpad of my work machine (which was actually a higher model of the same line as my personal laptop), but it turned out it used a different software driver (accidentally - I've swapped their SSDs and it turned out that the quality of their touchpads swapped as well :D). Also, both of these touchpads felt simply awful on Windows. After that I've spend some time figuring it out and it turns out that these days it's actually hard to get a crappy touchpad (unless you pay really crappy money for a whole machine). It's all in software.

by yaseer 8y ago

seba_dos1 8y ago

It really isn't. I'm a GNU/Linux user, but I have access to a Macbook and, what's more, have the Magic Trackpad 2 right in front of me. It's just a regular touchpad hardware, comparable to one in my Lenovo laptop, but with "force touch" - which if you don't care about silent clicking is just a gimmick that doesn't make much of a difference. (if you do care about not making clicking noise without having to "tap", then well, it is somewhat exceptional - that's why I own it) The "secret sauce" is simply in the application support for gestures. Even the driver isn't that exceptional (just well tuned), it's all toolkit and app support. On GNU/Linux you have several ways to support multitouch gestures, but all of them work as simple triggers - a completely different experience that what software on macOS usually provides.

yaseer 8y ago
Unless we come up with some objective criteria to compare touchpads, this may be a subjective judgement. Nevertheless, there are a large volume of people who subjectively believe Apple's touchpads 'feel' better and more precise, beyond just multi touch gestures. You could compare it to the handling of a car. There is some consensus luxury cars feel better to drive.
- seba_dos1 8y ago
  From what I gathered, it's actually another thing: there is a large volume of people using misconfigured or simply bad software with their perfectly fine hardware touchpads. Apple ones, that are actually well configured out-of-the-box, then "feel" better and more precise, and clueless people incorrectly blame their hardware for sub-par experience. Been there, done that. I've blamed a touchpad of my work machine (which was actually a higher model of the same line as my personal laptop), but it turned out it used a different software driver (accidentally - I've swapped their SSDs and it turned out that the quality of their touchpads swapped as well :D). Also, both of these touchpads felt simply awful on Windows. After that I've spend some time figuring it out and it turns out that these days it's actually hard to get a crappy touchpad (unless you pay really crappy money for a whole machine). It's all in software.