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Comment by fredley | Hacker News Reader

Trackpads are one of the main things that other companies just can't get right, even on premium devices. Given how long ago Apple 'solved' trackpads, I'm amazed that the rest of the industry hasn't caught up.

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True story: I still have one of the old white plastic MacBook 4,1s (w/ Intel Core 2 Duo, 2.4 GHz) from 2008. Even though it's eight years old and runs Snow Leopard, and will not run current XCode or Chrome/Firefox, and has slightly outdated command-line tools, it's still a functional rig that I can do a surprising amount of work on (especially since it remains plugged in all the time, SL is very stable, and I do a lot of work in vim/zsh/tmux).

Well, my wife has a brand-new Lenovo ThinkPad running Windows 10, which is probably one of the better-quality non-Apple laptops. My five-year-old son recently tried my old MacBook for the first time after using nothing but Mommy's before to watch Minecraft videos, and the first thing he said to me was, "Wow, Daddy! The trackpad on your old laptop is so much better than the one on Mommy's laptop."

This was not prompted by any audible parental Apple fanboyism. Somewhere, Steve Jobs is smiling...

It's a tricky thing. From my experience, the capacitive sensing chip vendors (e.g. Broadcom, Cypress, Atmel) want to move units but don't want to spend the time working on the necessary physical integration to make the sensing pad work correctly. A trackpad is really nothing more than a phone-class touchscreen without an LCD behind it. There's a lot of sensitivity tuning and noise rejection that needs to be performed to refine the performance.

It's not their field of specialization, and they don't want to manufacture the finished components themselves. Apple obviously has taken the time and care to get it right. A lot of others...it seems like they went with the reference design as being good enough.

It's not just the hardware either, it's the drivers. Try using bootcamp on a macbook pro. The previously-perfect trackpad becomes unusable. There is an apple-recommended driver you can install that helps, but not much.

The thing that bugs me is that companies are mindlessly copying Apple.

PC makers are basically copying Apple's implementation of trackpads without consideration to the execution. They spend a lot of time copying the superficial features of the Apple track pads, but no time on the actual functionality of the trackpads.

My main problem with trackpads on Windows laptops is actually a software problem: there's no separate sensitivity/acceleration settings for trackpads vs mice for Windows (MacOS has this).

Acceleration is pretty much a necessity for trackpads to be usable with high-res/multi monitor setups for me, but I cannot stand to use mice with acceleration enabled (probably a relic from my hardcore PC FPS gaming days... I get horribly distracted when my mouse movements don't map 1:1 to movements of my cursor). Not being able to keep separate settings for these different classes of input devices means I simply can't get any decent amount of work done on my laptop without connecting a mouse or going into my settings and enabling acceleration (and of course, disabling it afterwards when I need to use a mouse again, which is a huge PITA).

Having touch alleviates the problem somewhat, but there are still plenty of instances where having the precision of a touchpad is necessary.

Mainly, from what I can gather, because laptop makers (or trackpad makers) still haven't got their act together about including "precision touchpads". That was meant to sort out the touchpad issues a few years ago!

Mostly they seem not to bother fitting the newer type.

I've heard the new "Precision Touchpad" based devices are much better than the current crop of bad trackpads. They are on all "Surface" branded products and some OEMs. I haven't used any personally. YMMV.

Why is this so? Has anyone ever investigated the root causes?

Doesn't show up on a checklist. The checklist will just say the thing has a trackpad. Is it any good? Who knows, who knows.

I believe that Apple has patented a lot of what makes their touchpads so great, which makes it difficult for competitors to make an equivalent.

Samsung seemed to manage to do somewhat decent trackpads with their New Series 9 models, now discontinued in most parts of the world.

I don't think that's the reason why. Track pads are just another part of Apple's obsession with UX. They invest millions (literally) into track pad placement, feel, and ability knowing that users care about it and they'll make it up with volume. It's hard to justify UX spend.

Indeed. They purchased FingerWorks[1], a maker of obscure touchpad-based keyboards, in order to get their touchpad experts.

Most other companies would just integrate Synaptic's reference design and call it a day.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FingerWorks

Yes, these comments are exactly right. The other companies resigned to it being Good Enough for them, and don't care about making the trackpad excellent.

I'm not positive but I would guess that the hardware is pretty similar. The same manufacturer, synaptics, made the touchpad in my MBP and Thinkpad. Yet the Apple touchpad is far superior. Aside from the fact that my lenovo has a textured tract pad, I think the Apple software is just that much better.

Apple acquired FingerWorks[1] in 2005. They were pioneers in multi-touch pads. I believe their technology is one of the reasons the original iPhone was successful.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FingerWorks

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