Microsoft to Require Precision Touchpads in Future Windows 10 Laptops

The trackpads built into the Surface computers are still nowhere near the level of Apple's.

Indeed they should! I'd like to have a good pointer that I can glue to my keyboard and use leaned back.

I'd also like to configure what the gestures mean; there's no way to make three finger tap act like middle click. I use a Surface Pro 4. Microsoft has been very heavy handed about insisting you gesture only the way they want you to gesture. I really don't need a gesture to launch an already-disabled Cortana.

How "new" are we talking here? Dell's XPS line has had precision touchpads since the beginning of 2015.

>Precision Touchpad made its debut with Windows 8. Co-developed between Microsoft and touchpad company Synaptics, the spec changed how Windows works with touchpads. Traditionally, touchpads masqueraded to Windows as essentially USB- or PS/2-connected mice—simple two-dimension, single-input devices. Features such as multitouch and gestures were handled by a combination of the touchpad firmware and proprietary drivers. This meant that Windows itself had no ability to add new gestures or refine the finger-detection algorithms; it was all an opaque feature of the third-party drivers.

>With Precision Touchpad, the raw touchpad input is exposed to Windows itself, allowing the operating system to choose how it handles the complex multi-finger inputs. The gestures, the disambiguation of taps and swipes—these are all now performed by Windows, not a third-party driver.

http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/10/pc-oems-ditch-the-cus...

How is the trackpad otherwise, though?

I'm surprised she went with Lenovo, and unsurprised with the results, given their history of anticonsumer practices. They've been caught putting malware on their laptops a few times recently[0]. The ThinkPads made by Lenovo should never be compared with the ones made by IBM - that era is over.

[0]: http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/now-three-pre-installed-malware...

FWIW - On the last Thinkpad I bought (the X220) the touchpad was notably worse under than Windows with the official vendor drivers compared with Linux using whatever came out of the box. Two finger scrolling comes to mind - on Linux it worked smoothly, but with Windows, there was a considerable lag between me scrolling on the touchpad, and scrolling actually happening in the application.

sure, but generally if capabilities exist in the hardware applications will arise to take advantage of those capabilities.

In platform-specific matters like this (text rendering, input handling, &c.), Microsoft has always led the way in IE or now Edge, Mozilla following after a while (admittedly often years) in Firefox, and Chrome typically years later. Firefox and Edge handle precision touch very well; Chrome… well, it’s OK these days. But definitely not great.

I’m still waiting for Firefox or Chrome to actually implement the Pointer Events API properly. Edge does exactly what I expect, Firefox does almost everything as I expect, Chrome is simply terrible. And only Edge supports pressure sensitivity, so the Surface Pen only has full utility on Edge.

chrome does its own crazy smooth scrolling stuff, it has also been changing a lot in the last few release. YMMV.

But there won't be support if they are just one of many different types of hardware people have. That is probably why Microsoft is mandating them.

This is obviously a Chrome issue seeing as scrolling is super smooth in everything else

Are you looking at the original 2012 Surface Pro? The SP4 has a trackpad roughly as large as the Macbook Pro, as does the Surface Book.

They're already out there, such as in the Dell XPS 13. IIRC some of the features work better with libinput.

I was interested too with the Latitudes. The article is vague, but it does mention latest models.

I just picked up an e7440 - new but a few generations old - from the Dell business outlet. The touchpad (along with the battery) is the biggest weak point of the laptop. It works somewhat okay with Win 10, but it is awful on Linux using recent kernels on Fedora 25.

But I tend to use a MBP at work, and the touchpad on it is just so much better. I don't even bother with a mouse with the Mac as OSX really integrates the trackpad well. I am much happier with a decent wireless mouse with the Latitude.