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Comment by causi | Hacker News Reader

Is there a point to those giant touchpads? How do people tell where left and right click are without looking down? Personally I think the death of real mouse buttons is the worst laptop UX change in the last 20 years, even beating out chiclet keyboards.

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> How do people tell where left and right click are without looking down?

Commonly on large touchpads, left click is a one-finger tap, while right click is a two-finger tap, either of them taking place anywhere on the surface.

My impression is that dedicated click regions are going out of fashion.

That seems awful. The more force you have to use with your pointing finger the less accurate your position is. I can't imagine trying to aim and shoot with the same finger.

As with many things, this is something that feels weird for the first few days but is a complete non-issue once you got used to it. Just like typing on a keyboard without buttons when the first smartphones came out.

I can't imagine getting used to the force of a click feeling different depending on where my finger is. Clicking straight down in the middle vs clicking your finger sideways when it's near the far edge, etc. When I bought my last laptop I just gave up and 3D-printed buttons to put on the bottom of the pad.

Well in MacBooks there isn't actually any downward travel, it's just a solid block, there's only haptic feedback to indicate a click has been registered.

I don't see how that's relevant. No matter what the necessary force to actuate the click, it's a larger strain the further off perpendicular your finger is. That means it's different every time depending on where you're clicking.

I just tried several dozen clicks and not one of them moved the cursor at all through the press down/release cycle. Perhaps Apple is running algorithms to correct for this but it is a complete non-issue. You should try it and see how it feels!

Eaiser dragging and gestures I guess. But I think a lot of it is aesthetics. Apple keeps the same aspect ratio pad and then increases the size so it always fills the space between the keyboard and the edge of the laptop. So as screen size increases so does the trackpad. It does look better than when they didn't do this for example the old 17" MBP which IIRC had the same trackpad as the 13" at the time.

Large touchpads are much more comfortable and efficient to use, in my opinion. I think they have grew about 3x in size since I got my first laptop.

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