Hacker News Reader

Comment by maccard | Hacker News Reader

I agree with you on the precedent

> after MS implemented precision touchpads somewhere in 2015, and suddenly Windows touchpads became as precise as those on Macs.

There’s still a world of difference between a MacBook touchpad and a windows one. My work laptop (18 month old dell XPS) can’t hold a candle to my 6 year old MacBook’s trackpad.

> Likewise with RGB peripherals. Even GPU driver applications have increasingly become less useful as the most important features—power control, adaptive sync, HDR, etc have moved into native Windows settings.

The peripherals still need the addons though; I have ASUS armory crate, Corsair iCue and MSI center for my Motherboard, cooler and GPU respectively. They all suck.

View on HN

> There’s still a world of difference between a MacBook touchpad and a windows one. My work laptop (18 month old dell XPS) can’t hold a candle to my 6 year old MacBook’s trackpad.

The latest Dell trackpads are quite bad. Price or the product being premium or not unfortunately does not tell you if it will have a good trackpad or not. And it changes over time (Dell XPS used to have really good trackpads)

Basically you have to go to a store and try or find reviews that actually pay attention to this.

> There’s still a world of difference between a MacBook touchpad and a windows one

Oddly I've found otherwise (Dell Precision notebook from 2021, and Surface Laptop). It might be macOS's animations and smoothing interfering here, but I've found that my Windows touchpads are much more responsive, especially when swiping between desktops.

> The peripherals still need the addons though

Ugh, this is annoying. Hardware vendors need to be banned from writing lousy, inefficient, unsafe software.

On the trackpads - I only ever use my MacBook as a single screen device, so the experience may be different. A long time ago I used it with an external monitor and the experience was very poor compared to windows.

> Ugh, this is annoying. Hardware vendors need to be banned from writing lousy, inefficient, unsafe software.

Yeah, I commented on the McAfee LG thread but the stuff that comes bundled with hardware is embarassing. I don’t know how Razer, Logitech, nvidia, MSI, asus, etc get away with it. The stuff is awful, even their “good” software. I work in games and a few years ago the biggest correlation we had between unexplained crashes/performance problems in the wild was users having MSI Afterburner installed. Users thought it did great things and fixed a bunch of games but it absolutely thrashed everything we worked very hard to do and caused no end of issues doing so.

What part of Afterburner caused issues? I have it installed to undervolt an old GPU but not actively running.

One of the big ones is people just over clocking way past what’s sensible. Another is stuff like https://www.reddit.com/r/pathofexile/comments/z3xf5r/msi_aft... or https://www.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/comments/ob5jam/msi_af...

Other overlay apps like discord https://www.reddit.com/r/discordapp/comments/1jncrlc/new_ove... have similar issues - the way they work is by drive hooks and drawing over the application; depending on how close you are to the limit and how the game loop is coded this can very easily (and often does) cause micro stuttering, and in cases like discord causes massive performance problems regularly.

> Yeah, I commented on the McAfee LG thread but the stuff that comes bundled with hardware is embarassing. I don’t know how Razer, Logitech, nvidia, MSI, asus, etc get away with it. The stuff is awful, even their “good” software.

Well, this is the whole market on its own. It's entrepreneurship. No different than every web SaaS startup trying to capture some entry-level piece of computer use and then constrain it so it interoperates only with their "net of trusted partners".

They get away with it because everyone is happy and making money - the users, notably, are not part of the group here, and have no voice. The users are resources to be exploited. Same as on the web, and on most markets these days.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com