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> another Apple can’t put my finger on why this is so much better than everyone else things Once you’ve used a Mac touchpad, it’s impossible to go back to a Wi
by pico303 3y ago
> another Apple can’t put my finger on why this is so much better than everyone else things
Once you’ve used a Mac touchpad, it’s impossible to go back to a Windows/Linux laptop. I’ve tried…
- deafpolygon 3y agoMy current Lenovo laptop comes pretty close. I enjoy it a lot.
- silon42 3y agoPersonally, I don't like it as it's too large.. and I keep hitting it by mistake... for a while I ran Thinkpads with a touchpad disabled, just using the "nub".
- stronglikedan 3y agoI have both turned on on my thinkpad, but instinctively use the nub 90% of the time. I use the trackpad for scrolling and zooming a lot though. ANd if I'm using it on my couch, I need to turn the trackpad off completely, because my belly keeps activating it. :-/
- post-it 3y ago> can’t put my finger on why this is so much better than everyone else Because it doesn't move. When you press down on an Apple touchpad, it doesn't displace at all, it vibrates. This gives you an identical touch response across the entire trackpad, plus nifty things like Force Touch and customizable response intensity. Nobody else has done it, and it makes every other touchpad feel awful.
- RandallBrown 3y agoEven before Apple did that their trackpads were dramatically better.
- dsego 3y agoThe t480s on linux is not bad for pointing and dragging, multi finger gestures of course aren't close. I could live with it. But on windows, clicking is totally broken, if your finger moves just slightly (and it does, since it's hinged), the click isn't registered. The gestures are a joke, since they just play out an animation instead of locking onto the finger motion.
- RajT88 3y agoI'm just surprised that people feel so passionately about touchpads/trackpads. Apple can have the best one, sure, I believe it. But they still are bad pointing devices as a type of pointing device. People have gotten used to them, because what else can you really fit into a laptop?
- herval 3y agoIt's not a bad pointing device, that's the thing. I can use a Mac with a trackpad for pretty much anything, including image editing. It's precise, doesn't do ghost clicks/taps, and it's BIG I never found a non-Mac with a trackpad I could use _at all_. I always need a mouse to use my windows laptop...
- _ZeD_ 3y agoYeah try playing doom
- fredoliveira 3y agoHopefully you don't mean original doom, because if you do, boy do I have a surprise for you ;-)
- miffe 3y agoI'm curious what the surprise is? Is og doom actually playable with a trackpad?
- braymundo 3y agoKeyboard only.
- mrob 3y agoFalse. The installer lets you choose between keyboard only, keyboard + mouse, and keyboard + joystick. According to John Romero, keyboard + mouse was intended: https://twitter.com/romero/status/473587688977596416 https://twitter.com/romero/status/473587688977596416
- amatecha 3y agoI actually thought the trackpad was better with an actual physical click. To me the versions immediately prior to making it a stationary piece of glass was basically the best trackpad I've ever used in my life. It's disappointing how no other laptop manufacturer comes even close. I approach every single new laptop like "okay, is this finally the one that even compares?" and EVERY TIME I am like "wow, yup, it's been this many years and still not even close"...
- goosedragons 3y agoSteam Deck has TWO!
- herval 3y agoSteam Deck's little trackpads are pretty amazing, can confirm!
- ndiddy 3y agoThere's a company called Sensel that makes vibrating trackpads similar to Apple's, Lenovo has been putting them in some of their Thinkpad laptops. https://sensel.com/ https://sensel.com/
- Daneel_ 3y agoGive me dedicated buttons for clicking, including middle click. God I miss the old Lenovo trackpads.
- not_alexb 3y agoI have an M1 and several thinkpads and the M1 always feels like such a chore to use, so no, not even remotely in my case.
- kayodelycaon 3y agoI have a cheap Lenovo Chromebook ($140 MSRP) and the trackpad is nearly as good as an Apple one when running ChromeOS. So it's definitely possible for a cheap machine to have a good trackpad. Why does everything else suck so badly? Is it just the drivers?
- sonofhans 3y agoApple’s been making better trackpads literally forever, and better drivers, too. I run Windows on an iMac Pro (for gaming) and sometimes use an Apple Magic Trackpad. It’s _dramatically_ worse in Windows than in MacOS. So, as usual, it’s not just that Apple makes better hardware. They do — their trackpads have always been more precise. But the software interpreting signals from that hardware is much better as well. In Windows I get more accidental touches turned to clicks; pinch-to-zoom is less reliable; taps are often misinterpreted or missed.
- thomastjeffery 3y agoThankfully, Linux touchpad drivers have been great for several years now.
- dhruvmittal 3y agoI've very happily left a Mac touchpad. Not once but twice. While the gesture support in the OS is nice, I don't like how big the touchpads are. I feel like it regularly gets in the way of typing. I'm okay with the size of the trackpad on the Framework laptop, but it could have been smaller. I really miss my old Thinkpad trackpad with the physical buttons between the trackpad and spacebar, which I felt was really usable.
- SamuelAdams 3y agoFor me it’s not about how big it is. The MacBook trackpads feel very precise. I rarely mis-click a part of my screen because my cursor drifted too far.
- ArchOversight 3y agoApple's touch detection for when you place your hands on the touchpad while typing is top-notch though. It's what allows them to make the touchpad so big, while still making the keyboard easily accessible.
- avidphantasm 3y agoI hated how big the trackpad on my 2019 16” MBP was. I now have a 2021 14” M1 Pro and the trackpad is the perfect size. I believe they also reduced the size of the 16” M* Pro/Max machines.
- whatch 3y ago> I feel like it regularly gets in the way of typing I understand that everyone's experience can be different. But wow I just noticed that my palms are so often on the touchpad while I'm typing and I have never ever had any problem with that. Also I usually use my thumb to move cursor and click while other fingers stay on the keys and I cannot remember when it didn't behave according to my intentions. Especially considering the bigger contact area between a thumb and touchpad compared to other fingers. I just checked edge cases and it works very reliably. Cursor doesn't move if I use my palm. It does move if palm is on the touchpad and I use my thumb. It does move as expected if I move both thumb and palm over touchpad synchronously. It follows the thumb as expected if I move both my thumb and palm in different directions. I remember my first touchpad on macbook air 13 from 2011. It felt so much better than anything I tried before. But at that time it was physical and it had dead zone at the top of the touchpad. And it was smaller. Today's touchpad macbook pro touchpad is an engineering marvel.
- treprinum 3y agoDunno, my Zenbook S UX393 has a glass touchpad as well (with some mini display underneath) and feels like the one on my MacBook but I can set up three buttons at the bottom, not just one. Moreover, it has 3300x2200 screen with slim bezels and without any insane notch and it can run Linux smoothly without waiting for GPU drivers to be usable.
- addisonl 3y agoGlass stopped being the special sauce for the MacBook trackpads a while ago when they introduced Force Touch. Now you can click anywhere on the trackpad with adjustable “click” feedback. I’m sure yours is nice but no one comes close to MacBook trackpads’ usability.
- Moldoteck 3y agoI think xps 13 plus can be pretty close since they have force touch too. Not sure but maybe surface studio also has something similar
- dsego 3y agoThat's ok, but why limit triggers to button areas when 1-finger click anywhere on the trackpad can be left-click and 2-finger click anywhere can be right-click. Macs also have force touch for additional actions. There is probably a 3-finger click option as well. I don't have to know where the buttons are or look for them, no eyes need to be on the touchpad or keyboard, it's just an extension of my fingers.
- semireg 3y agoI turn on the 3-finger-drag accessibility option on my Mac trackpads. It works amazingly well. You can drag, cmd-tab, and even add an additional click to focus a part of an app without losing the drag. I’m amazed every time.
- treprinum 3y agoIt's not limiting, it can be set up that way as well. But you have an extra option to set up 3 button behavior as well which is missing on MacBooks.
- Al-Khwarizmi 3y ago> Once you’ve used a Mac touchpad, it’s impossible to go back to a Windows/Linux laptop. I’ve tried… I have the same problem, but with TrackPoints. It's impossible for me to use any trackpad after trying that, and that has had me tied to ThinkPads for the last 18 years.
- amatecha 3y agoYeah, it does drive me crazy using laptops without a TrackPoint. It is REALLY convenient and quick to use. Daily-driving an X230 and it's just so low-friction to work with.
- saltcured 3y agoMe too, but I feel like I'm being slowly boiled with the trackpoint behavior on Fedora. I keeps changing over time and also being inconsistent between different devices in my possession. It is jarring to move between keyboards and have to completely recalibrate my hands to the different behavior. Try as I might, I can't seem to make them converge with the mouse/trackpoint settings controls in the GUI. The input method also does not seem to "scale" well with large or high-dpi screens, so even just changing resolutions for a work session can also disrupt the behavior on one single device.
- eviks 3y agoTrackpoint + Apple touchpad + physical buttons = ideal input
- _ZeD_ 3y agoI assure you that's not true
- CarVac 3y agoI tried one the other day at an Apple store. The click feedback is too weak, and the stepless acceleration is not what my brain expects, so I found it frustrating.
- jkingsman 3y agoYou can customize the intensity of the click feedback as it's not actually a click but a linear actuator tapping back at your finger from the other side. Mouse acceleration intensity and curve are editable as well. Perfectly fine for it to not be your cup of tea, but there is some customizability.
- mistercheph 3y agoI did not find this to be true.
- strzibny 3y agoIt's better to have TrainPoint than a slightly better touchpad. That's my take:)
- mike-cardwell 3y agoshrug I have an M2 Macbook for work and a Thinkpad with Debian for personal use. I much prefer my Thinkpad's pointing stick to the Macbooks touchpad.
- mrob 3y agoI've used a Mac touchpad, and IMO it's pretty much the same as every other touchpad: so dramatically worse than a real mouse that I'll do everything possible to avoid using it. Of course, there may be differences in degrees of badness, but I'm never going to notice, because if I really can't manage with keyboard shortcuts I'll just plug in an external mouse.
- dsego 3y agoOne thing that it's brilliant at is dragging, you press down on an icon with the index finger and drag around with the middle finger by just touching, while keeping the index pressed. It works beautifully once you're used to the motion. You don't have to keep the index pressed and drag it at the same time.
- ubermonkey 3y agoTrue fact: I had no idea what the "usability gap" was on touchpads, even 10+ years ago before the physical click was gone, until I was on a biz trip with a Windows-using colleague who'd forgotten his mouse. He took a cab from the hotel to a Best Buy to buy a mouse, and I teased him about it. Like, are you such a hothouse flower you can't work for 4 days with the touchpad? He said something to the effect of "oh, like you wouldn't do the same thing if you left YOUR mouse at home," which was when I realized he hadn't ever noticed that I don't travel with a mouse. "But how do you put up with it? It's SO BAD!" "It really isn't; I never think about it!" And we were baffled by each other for a few minutes, and only when we swapped laptops did either of us realize the HUGE gap. I had no idea Wintel touchpads were so awful in that era (and horribly horribly small), and he had no idea that a touchpad could actually be good. It was a weird moment. (It took a while, but Dell at least caught up. The pad on my XPS15 is, while not Mac-level, absolutely usable. I have no experience with other Wintel makes in the last 5 or 10 years, but I assume the same is true of HP and Lenovo.)
- fomine3 3y agoIs touchpad good pointing device is a different question.