It’s 2022 and Windows touchpads and touchpad drivers don’t hold a candle to my 2011 MacBook.
What, specifically, is the problem with touchpads on windows?
Some specific issues though I have seen is general lack of responsiveness or missing the first bit of movement and no gestures or gestures that just don’t work as well.
- Mac touchpads have near-perfect wrist detection so you almost never get an errant input.
- There is virtually no input lag. It’s especially crucial when scrolling long pages. On a Mac, you can flick the touchpad and the page will scroll all the way down.
- Furthermore, they perfectly recognize up to 10 fingers. There’s a lot of great software that allows you to set shortcuts to different mouse gestures like 3-,4-, 5-finger swipes, tip-taps, and more.
- There’s a really smooth acceleration curve that allows you to be extremely precise with the mouse while also allowing it to span great distances when needed.
Like the other poster said, there are so many subtle differences that amount to a gargantuan delta between the two experiences.
I don't perceive any lag on both my thinkpad and my pro admitedly crappy Dell laptop on Linux when scrolling anything and I don't recall having felt a significant difference with windows when it was last fired up or on Mac laptops I tried in the past. Most of the difference usually came from a difference in the speed and acceleration settings but these are configurables.
Can't speak about gestures because that is something most people don't use.
1. when I type only the tip of my fingers enter in contact with the laptop, my wrists are in the air.
2. if I rest my hands on the laptop they sit on both side of the trackpad, not on it.
The acceleration is okay on the touchpad, but the fact that it carries over to the mouse as well is an abomination.
I only ever miss two apps from macOS: Preview and LaTeXiT.
For me the experience has been the opposite. I could never get used to things not working fluidly enough. When I finally decided to embrace the level of integration apple devices provide, the world of pain that windows was to work with eased up a lot. Windows seemed a patchwork of things cobbled together with no real coordination, parts that don't work very well together, and messy visual/interaction design where the users' point of view hasn't been a priority.
My Lenovo Thinkpad doesn’t even have a discrete GPU and drives my monitor fine, much better than the $2,000+ MacBook Pros I had.
There are concrete things that just do not work on macOS or, if they do work, not work well.
Lastly, macOS is a compromise in two wrong directions. One is that it’s not Linux, so the Unix experience is compromised and dealing with Homebrew is a pain. I constantly had trouble with asdf and other Linux tools on macOS that I never have issue with in WSL on Windows. It seems any tool on macOS needs several workarounds. That doesn’t exist on Windows for development tools because I directly use Linux through WSL. Then I get to use Windows for everything else, which has much more stable driver support. The other direction is macOS, which keeps moving towards a locked down, mobile-like experience.
My job forced me to use Windows, and it is terrible for my productivity and what not. One day, one of the screens stopped working when in use with dual display another day the fingerprint reader stopped working for log-ins, but still works for the first half of setting up a new fingerprint. I can't even charge my headphones without special drivers!
Look. We all have our pet peeves with OSs, but they are not relevant to TFA
also this laptop keeps giving me static shocks. i never had issues with pre 2015 era macbooks which i think were pretty good.
Conversely, to supply one Gladwell's worth of anecdata, I've never had a MacBook (in 10+ years) that has had any issues with streaming audio over Bluetooth (several TaoTronics dongles, standalone speakers, PLT headphones, Aftershokz headphones, etc.)