4 ms·

The short answer is boring and won't win any PC vs Mac arguements online - it's about economies of scale. Nobody wants to design, manufacture and mass-produce a

The short answer is boring and won't win any PC vs Mac arguements online - it's about economies of scale. Nobody wants to design, manufacture and mass-produce a line of haptic trackpads unless they have an enormous lineup of machines that can use them. To Apple, the interests aligned and the investment paid off. Other manufacturers have tried the haptic trackpad route, but nobody has the tenure in that field that Apple does. Despite that, I still share your sentiment. MacOS isn't a suitable environment for a lot of development work, and Apple makes no attempts to acknowledge of fix these gaps. Depending on your workload, maybe an Asahi Mac would work well? If you're just interested in a gesture-based workflow, KDE's Wayland session ships default with Asahi and is a great experience for gesture-lovers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aBEsxTVRsEo&t=134s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aBEsxTVRsEo&t=134s My experience using KDE with a Magic Trackpad 2 has been excellent. I get the smooth scrolling and responsive gesture support I missed from MacOS, with constantly improving support in apps like Firefox, which recently got a great 1:1 pinch-to-zoom and two-finger-swipe back gesture. My only complaints come down to the price, fragility of the thing, and the Lovecraftian horror they list as a "Lightning port".

apatheticonion 3y ago
It's really surprising and also a real shame. I have played around with my friend's Windows Surface laptop and it was quite good, but that has been the only PC laptop I have seen come close. I actually have Asahi installed as a second OS on my MBP and considered going with Asahi and something like an ROG Ally for work/play... but of course Asahi isn't cleared for work use by our security team. With that in mind, I tried it anyway and had a lot of issues with dependencies missing arm64 binaries which unfortunately makes it difficult (if not impossible) to compile the giant projects with stale dependencies we have at the place I work.
- smoldesu 3y ago
  Surface machines feel nice and do their due x86 diligence, but they're just as ugly as a Macbook when something goes wrong. My Surface Pro 3 was a great machine, sadly plagued with a dearth of issues that could only be solved by replacing it. I like feeling like a premium user with milled aluminum and all that, but the fragility of those machines just make me too paranoid to carry them around. They make poor work laptops in my opinion, but I guess it's all very subjective and depends on the sort of "work" you do. My best compromise recommendation is to swallow the cost and get a Magic Trackpad. They work great on Linux, and the only "broken" feature is Force Touch. If you're using GNOME or KDE in a Wayland session, it will zip around and make you happier than a kid in Compiz. > With that in mind, I tried it anyway and had a lot of issues with dependencies missing arm64 binaries You don't know the half of it. I worked on internal tooling at a mostly-Mac studio during the Apple Silicon transition... it was awful. Our entire engineering team bought "upgrades" before we knew if our product even built on M1, and wouldn't you know it, huge portions of our build system was unusable. So then they all switched to cloud-only builds, and then eventually to builds in an accelerated Linux VM, and then to a mostly ARM-native pipeline with Rosetta shims for the less cooperative software. Mind you, we didn't actually ship to Mac. We wasted hundreds of engineering hours a month just because we wanted to develop on them locally, and by the time I left that dream wasn't even a reality yet. YMMV, but for enormous and fragile business frameworks that's not an uncommon story or anything.
  - midoridensha 3y ago
    >My best compromise recommendation is to swallow the cost and get a Magic Trackpad. I don't get it: this appears to be an external device. The whole point of a trackpad is that it's built into your laptop. If I'm going to carry an external device around and plug it in every time I use my laptop on-the-go, I'll just get a mouse.
    - apatheticonion 3y ago
      Haha, there has to be a modding community dedicated to embedding this into a laptop shell google's furiously
      - midoridensha 3y ago
        I'm surprised no one's tried modding touchpads (such as MacBook ones) to fit different laptops, but I think it would be nearly impossible to do well, because the dimensions of the touchpads are going to be different, so making the transplant fit would require manufacturing a new top cover (the part that surrounds the keyboard) for the target laptop, which would be pretty much impossible for someone without access to a plastics factory, or who can finance a large enough order to do the engineering and tooling set-up for that with a contract manufacturer. But I wonder if anyone's tried to do it at all, even if the results are a bit ugly.
        smoldesu 3y ago
        Maybe I'm crazy, but I just place mine to the right side of my laptop and use it like normal. It feels natural and is what I'm used to at my desk, and lets me sorta position my display wherever feels right while I work. It's not ideal, I guess, but the trackpad barely takes up space in my daily carry and is always charged at my desk. If I'm headed out for a longer productivity session, sometimes I'll toss it in my bag just to work a little more comfortably.
        midoridensha 3y ago

apatheticonion 3y ago

It's really surprising and also a real shame. I have played around with my friend's Windows Surface laptop and it was quite good, but that has been the only PC laptop I have seen come close. I actually have Asahi installed as a second OS on my MBP and considered going with Asahi and something like an ROG Ally for work/play... but of course Asahi isn't cleared for work use by our security team. With that in mind, I tried it anyway and had a lot of issues with dependencies missing arm64 binaries which unfortunately makes it difficult (if not impossible) to compile the giant projects with stale dependencies we have at the place I work.

smoldesu 3y ago
Surface machines feel nice and do their due x86 diligence, but they're just as ugly as a Macbook when something goes wrong. My Surface Pro 3 was a great machine, sadly plagued with a dearth of issues that could only be solved by replacing it. I like feeling like a premium user with milled aluminum and all that, but the fragility of those machines just make me too paranoid to carry them around. They make poor work laptops in my opinion, but I guess it's all very subjective and depends on the sort of "work" you do. My best compromise recommendation is to swallow the cost and get a Magic Trackpad. They work great on Linux, and the only "broken" feature is Force Touch. If you're using GNOME or KDE in a Wayland session, it will zip around and make you happier than a kid in Compiz. > With that in mind, I tried it anyway and had a lot of issues with dependencies missing arm64 binaries You don't know the half of it. I worked on internal tooling at a mostly-Mac studio during the Apple Silicon transition... it was awful. Our entire engineering team bought "upgrades" before we knew if our product even built on M1, and wouldn't you know it, huge portions of our build system was unusable. So then they all switched to cloud-only builds, and then eventually to builds in an accelerated Linux VM, and then to a mostly ARM-native pipeline with Rosetta shims for the less cooperative software. Mind you, we didn't actually ship to Mac. We wasted hundreds of engineering hours a month just because we wanted to develop on them locally, and by the time I left that dream wasn't even a reality yet. YMMV, but for enormous and fragile business frameworks that's not an uncommon story or anything.
- midoridensha 3y ago
  >My best compromise recommendation is to swallow the cost and get a Magic Trackpad. I don't get it: this appears to be an external device. The whole point of a trackpad is that it's built into your laptop. If I'm going to carry an external device around and plug it in every time I use my laptop on-the-go, I'll just get a mouse.
  - apatheticonion 3y ago
    Haha, there has to be a modding community dedicated to embedding this into a laptop shell google's furiously
    - midoridensha 3y ago
      I'm surprised no one's tried modding touchpads (such as MacBook ones) to fit different laptops, but I think it would be nearly impossible to do well, because the dimensions of the touchpads are going to be different, so making the transplant fit would require manufacturing a new top cover (the part that surrounds the keyboard) for the target laptop, which would be pretty much impossible for someone without access to a plastics factory, or who can finance a large enough order to do the engineering and tooling set-up for that with a contract manufacturer. But I wonder if anyone's tried to do it at all, even if the results are a bit ugly.
      - smoldesu 3y ago
        Maybe I'm crazy, but I just place mine to the right side of my laptop and use it like normal. It feels natural and is what I'm used to at my desk, and lets me sorta position my display wherever feels right while I work. It's not ideal, I guess, but the trackpad barely takes up space in my daily carry and is always charged at my desk. If I'm headed out for a longer productivity session, sometimes I'll toss it in my bag just to work a little more comfortably.
        midoridensha 3y ago