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Comment by mih | Hacker News Reader

I hear you. I have the same thoughts. Touchpads on most laptops have sufficed for my use. People swear by the touchpad on Macbooks, but to me it never really was that big of an improvement. My bias could be due to the fact that I don't use the touchpad exclusively and always attach a mouse when I can.

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Its a hangover for 10 years ago when low end laptop touchpads were pretty bad.

I find my carbon X1 touchpad nicer to use than my 15" macpro.

Although I am impressed how well they made the haptic tap feel like a real button on the mac.

The X1 isn’t low end. Low end trackpads on windows laptops are still abysmal in most cases.

Anecdotally, there’s a store near me which arranges laptops by price. I often start at the high end and try the keyboard and mouse, working my way to the low end. Somewhere in the middle it changes over from “this is fine” to “it feels like nails on a chalk board”.

Gesture support is also incredible on macOS. It's the little things -- if I start the motion to "show desktop" by spreading my fingers apart on the touchpad, windows will seamlessly start the motion with my fingers. If I decide to abort the gesture with my fingers, windows on the screen match my motion exactly. I can also customize gestures like expose, mission control, desktop switching, etc. to my liking by assigning different gestures to different commands -- I've never used a Windows laptop or any kind of linux environment with that kind of customization, though I'm sure with sufficient work you could get linux to do something like that.

Personally I find gesture support annoying and its functions are better done with keyboard shortcuts - if you want to show the desktop pressing windows-D is much quicker and easier. The first thing I do on a new laptop is find the touchpad settings and turn everything off.

I find it ironic that Apple used to push the one button mice narrative as 2 buttons were overwhelming, yet now you are supposed to contort your fingers into doing a million different gestures on a touch pad.

Bought a mid-tier HP Pavilion recently and cannot _stand_ the touchpad on it. I carry around a USB mouse for that laptop. I largely prefer the mac touchpad because it allows you to click everywhere on the surface, not just the bottom.

HP until recently didn't use precision touch drivers.

When looking for a new laptop it should be the first thing you check in the reviews - if it doesn't have precision touch drivers it goes in the do not buy list.

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