4 ms·

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 b

by mad182 5y ago

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.

flohofwoe 5y ago
Not OP, but on my Windows (with Synaptics driver) and Linux laptops I usually have problems with palm detection so I get accidential random clicks (with "tap to click" enabled) and erratic scrolling and zooming. Sometimes multi-touch gestures "stick" and remain active even if there's only one finger on the touchpad. It's basically required to disable tap-to-click (but this still doesn't fix all issues where the palm detection fails). 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.
hargv 5y ago
I find it likely that this is an example of someone using a macbook only for a long time, forming the opinion that the macbook touchpad is the standard and then finding everything flawed by comparison because its not quite the same. 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.

by mad182 5y ago

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.

flohofwoe 5y ago

Not OP, but on my Windows (with Synaptics driver) and Linux laptops I usually have problems with palm detection so I get accidential random clicks (with "tap to click" enabled) and erratic scrolling and zooming. Sometimes multi-touch gestures "stick" and remain active even if there's only one finger on the touchpad. It's basically required to disable tap-to-click (but this still doesn't fix all issues where the palm detection fails). 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.

hargv 5y ago

I find it likely that this is an example of someone using a macbook only for a long time, forming the opinion that the macbook touchpad is the standard and then finding everything flawed by comparison because its not quite the same. 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.