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Comment by gburdell3 | Hacker News Reader

It has to be software. I have a ThinkPad that I recently installed macOS on (not advocating hackintosh, but it's a fun project nonetheless) and the trackpad feels every bit as good as a real Mac. Smooth scrolling, smooth gesture recognition, everything just feels good. The hardware is capable of processing the gestures, but the non-Apple software just does a terrible job of making it feel good to use.

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It’s definitely not just software. If you connect an Apple Magic Trackpad to a Linux machine running X, it works way, way better than the garbage that’s built into most PC laptops.

Also note that Lenovo itself has a huge variation in trackpad quality. My relatively new thinkpad (thinkpad-branded but I think the model number was yoga 360) from work has a trackpad that is just barely usable. My personal yoga c740 has a trackpad that is actually pretty nice and gets close to MBP quality when it comes to movement/accuracy (it does still lack gestures and good right-click support though, and that is likely a software issue).

I really hope these guys pick good trackpads. I can grudgingly live with a stunted feature set (gestures etc) for now because I know X makes it difficult or impossible to get right, but I absolutely cannot abide a trackpad that feels shitty and inaccurate just for moving the mouse around.

This is true, although it is probably because of the software being built into the trackpad itself.

I suspect the key software is in the firmware of the trackpad itself. The hardware does a lot of processing of the raw signals before it hands the data to the trackpad driver. The driver does additional processing, of course, but this also means that alternate trackpad implementations need more than just the right driver code. The firmware plays a key role.

I have Intel MacBook Pro and the behavior of trackpad under Windows in BootCamp is just terrible while in a Windows VM or on a remote Windows desktop it is almost as good as on Mac. So I doubt it is in firmware.

> I suspect the key software is in the firmware of the trackpad itself.

What your parent comment (the comment you replied to) said refutes the reply you made.

They installed OSX on a ThinkPad, and observed the desired OSX-like trackpad behavior. Apple does not write firmware for thinkpad pointing devices, so it cannot be firmware-specific behavior.

It it software. As they did to ios, the MacOs has highest priority to all interface actions.That's why the scrolling on ios and MacOs is usually very smooth. The interface get the highest priority so if the computer is struggling with lots of simulaneous processes, the interface still will feel smooth. Very smart solution to prioritize UX. Why they didn't do the same on windows/android? No idea.

Also good defaults. In fact they don't even have certain settings in MacOS. For example you can't change the pointer acceleration, but the default one is just perfect.

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