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Comment by jordache | Hacker News Reader

How hard is it for device makers to prefect the touchpad? It should be a no brainer like mouse devices by now huh?

Someone has. It's in MacBooks.

I get that I'm in the extreme minority here, but I pretty much hate all touchpads, including Apple's. I hate Apple's the least, so I will concede that Apple makes the best touch pads.

I wish all the PC makers would stop trying to copy the Apple model of "all touch surface, and the pad on a rocker for buttons". I'm probably being old and cranky (for context, my very first laptop was an Apple Powerbook 170 with a track ball, and it was AWESOME), but I prefer the days when you could get a consumer laptop that had a touchpad with two discrete buttons. These days, you're generally stuck choosing from some ugly business and gaming laptops if you want real touchpad buttons.

Funny, I liked the trackball laptops as well. I had an old Zenith with one and later a Dell laptop with one (Latitude Xpi iirc). That Dell had MMX, so it would play mp3s in Musicmatch Jukebox without skipping like my desktop at the time would. Desktop trackballs are still a thing; I like my Kensington Expert Mouse Wireless Trackball quite a bit with my mac. The scroll ring feels kind of janky for a $100 mouse but it works.

On the new one, it’s no longer on a rocker. If you manage to deep freeze the kernel, the trackpad stops clicking. The click is somehow created after force touch(?) deems your press to be hard enough for click.

Hello fellow minority. Though I don't like Apple's at all, albeit the last time I used one was in 2014 or 2015 so maybe they're better. I liked my really old Dell Inspiron 1000's better than the Macbooks I've tried. And I used to use a laptop with just a nub in the middle and two buttons below the space bar, that was my favorite, I could actually play FPS games with it, and it meshed well with vim usage. But these days I almost always just use a wireless mouse. It's no extra cost to carry around when I have to carry around a charger, the times I want/need to use a laptop in a suboptimal environment (like on my lap) are so minimal that I can't care too much about the quality of a touchpad. Does it let me tap once to click, tap with two fingers to right click? Good enough.

I could never make touchpads work for me. The only laptops I could tolerate were Lenovo's because of the touchpoint thing. My first MacBook was the first time I had a touchpad I could not only use but actively liked.

But actually my Lenovo with Linux touchpad and Chromebooks are all fine for me today. Though my MacBooks and external Apple touchpad on my desktop are still the best. The only touchpad that still annoys me to the point where I need to use a mouse is a 17" Dell Alienware laptop running Windows 10.

The 'Force Touch' trackpads I am not a fan of at all. I do not like them nearly as much as my 2012 MBP that actually clicks. They had them perfected and then messed with them IMHO.

Really? I find the Force Touch trackpads to "click" in almost the same way as the older ones did.

+1 on that. Especially since the force touch. I've been using Macbooks for 10 years now and just don't understand why other trackpads just don't work flawlessly. For me other trackpads feel like the difference with smartphones and old phone touchscreens. I even enjoy gaming on a Macbook trackpad.

its probably insanely expensive/complex to revisit the cheap commodity touchpad hardware and the crappy drivers that already available. & doesn't pencil out with the razor thin margins for PC laptops

PC laptops don't cost that much less than similarly speced macbooks. Why would their margins be so much worse?

You need a lot of R&D to get there.

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