I really don't understand why nobody else has managed making decent touchpads. Is it not extremely high priority??
The vast majority of people don’t care about trackpad quality when it comes to shopping.
They do care when they *use* it but they either take it for granted when it works well, or it’s too small a papercut to trade in their device and buy/research a new one.
but it all combines together to make a smoother experience when using it, and it can convert people as a part of a whole.
This is why people balk at the price of Apple Vision even though Apple managed to miniaturize a Macbook into a visor and added LiDAR, two 4K screens, a separate depth sensor, several other cameras, and even a 3D camera to it
That said, Mark’s devices aren’t bad for the price. They’ve been the best overall VR headsets for the past 2-3 years.
Most of the time they don't notice at all unless its truly atrocious or truly mind blowing (and whilst I can firmly say the macbook trackpad is the best I've ever used, lets be honest its not mind blowing). They might notice things don't feel as smooth as it did on their macbook (assuming they even had one last, if not how can you tell something is worse if its all you've ever had), but they're unlikely to narrow this down to the trackpad.
Few months back I’ve seen anecdotal posts somewhere that new generations of managers are trying to shift computing to phones and tablets because they’re “better than laptops”. No one enforces a delightfulness standard for Windows laptops, and it is creating a skewed perception.
I used to be a die hard Android and Windows/Linux power user. I’d scoff at all the stuff people would mention on iOS/macOS because “well I can do that too if I do this and that”. But then I switched back to iOS/macOS for a project and a lot of the papercuts being solved out of the box was actually such a huge gain.
That’s not to say Apple is perfect. They can improve a ton too (give me a proper path bar in finder please!), but (and I say this often) the products they make are more than the sum of their parts.
but of course none of that is something that is evident when you’re shopping for a product.
Plus, the question one would ask is: “can this do this banal task?” not “which one does this banal task better”. So I see why it’s not prioritized on other platforms.
Most people are just shopping for capability and specs. The delightfulness is too ephemeral to consider until you encounter it yourself.
But the uni student with a budget that only buys half a macbook doesn't get to care about trackpad quality.
Normal people don't say things like "The trackpad is unresponsive and the wifi drivers unreliable" They say "I just don't like it" "It feels kinda crap"
The worst by far I've ever used was on a circa-2007 HP convertible laptop that ran Vista. Despite it costing more than some models of MacBook at the time, the thing was built with that cheap creaky "fake metal" glossy plastic, and that included its trackpad. The trackpad would've been bad enough just like that with the smooth plastic gripping at your fingertips, but to make it worse its surface had inverse dimples, and because its touch sensitivity wasn't all that sensitive you had to apply more pressure when using it which pressed your fingers down into the dimples and made them stick even worse. Oh and of course, as was customary for non-Apple laptops at that point it was also tiny.
It's almost as if it was someone's job to make that thing's trackpad terrible to use. Just mind boggling.
It has been a quarter century since high DPI CRTs were affordable, and 20+ years since LCDs were.
However, Windows wasn’t compatible with such things until at least 2010, so here we are a quarter century later, and laptop lines still often only offer meh-for-the-late-90’s displays.
A more recent example is suspend resume. I’m not sure of the details, but I am sure that intel will never do better than S3 sleep from ten years ago, and Microsoft pushed them to change how sleep works.
"These rounded corners in the UI really make me not care about the touch pad"
"I wish I could care about touchpads, my ssd won't replace itself without a soldering iron though!"
"They have touchpads? I use a mouse"
Great. Apple touchpads are next generation compared to most other laptops.
More extensive touch support, like having touch support on the laptop display alleviates a lot of the trackpad needs. It's still nice when it smooth and responsive, but looking at the the Surface devices for instance, it's nice enough.