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Comment by overgard | Hacker News Reader

I don't know that apple gets this right either. (I have a macbook). The actual tracking feels fantastic and precise, and it has a nice texture, but I /hate/ how they refuse to put real buttons below it. Things like "right mouse drag" which I use all the time become a nightmare, and the whole "no buttons" thing just seems like it's putting aesthetics over functionality.

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I love the lack of buttons. It makes it much much easier to click on things since I don't have to precisely hit a button. I don't think I've ever used a right click drag for anything, but it seems easy enough to do on my macbook pro. Just click with two fingers and drag.

It's not an either/or situation. You can have physical buttons, and still let you tap for a click.

I'm not talking about tap to click. I'm talking about the whole trackpad being a button.

I have a chromebook designed like this, and it removes any precision in clicking. I push down, and my finger slips as the trackpad depresses.

Usually I don't find myself clicking on my Macbook trackpad anyway. I usually just tap, plenty of precision that way, plus OSX tends to have larger click targets than Windows and lots of gestures (especially with BetterTouchTool) that make precision less important.

My only issue is click-and-drag, but that was at least somewhat alleviated when I learned to hold the click with my index finger and do the drag by moving my middle finger (which is similar to what I'd do with a trackpad with dedicated mouse buttons anyway) instead of just using my index finger.

There's no reason you couldn't do both. I really hate the trackpad click thing though for a specific reason: the pressure required changes based on where you are on the trackpad. It takes much more force to click at the top than at the bottom, so I end up using my thumb to click on the bottom anyway, at which point... I'd rather just have a proper button.

Have you tried "touch to click"? And also, "double-tap-and-hold-to-drag"?

IIRC, there's a setting in OS X to make it act like a traditional one- or two-button touchpad, i.e. it only recognizes clicks if your finger is in the appropriate place.

The reason is aesthetics. No buttons makes it look sleek, which is all the OEMs are going for. Same reason has driven the other changes in recent ThinkPads. It's purely about looks, with making it functional coming far behind. (One example of many: New ThinkPads have no way to determine if they are charging/plugged in, except by carefully looking for a few seconds after a state transition. If the plug is loose or another problem happens while you think it's charging, they give you no notification. This is purely a twisted sense of aesthetics, trying to make it feel less IBM. And on more than one occasion, this has caused me serious issues as I discovered too late that my system was out of power.)

I had the same experience with a relatively recent (2013?) Macbook, trying to help someone with one. I agree the tracking is quite nice, but clicking it requires far more force than I'm used to, meaning that trying to hold it down and drag is even worse - the friction is too high. The tactile response when it goes down and back up is also a bit weird; it's too dull and heavy-feeling when it goes down, there's almost no travel, and it comes back up with little sensation. It feels more like a "thud" than a "click", almost like the entire case of the machine is yielding slightly.

After working the trackpad a few more times and my fingers getting rather tired I tried to use keyboard shortcuts instead, but remembered that OS X doesn't have the Alt+ key combinations that Windows has, and tabbing through controls is disabled by default.

(My usual laptop is a Thinkpad X60, where I use the trackpoint and its buttons, and keyboard shortcuts whenever possible. On my desktop, I use a Microsoft Wheel Mouse Optical v1.1A, which I think is one of the best mouses ever made.)

You can turn on tap to click, but I find that while it works very well for OS X, I get too many false clicks in Windows while typing so have to disable it there.

For click and drag, don't use your index finger to both keep the button depressed AND move the pointer. On a regular trackpad you'd click the left button with index finger and move the pointer by moving middle finger over the trackpad; you can do the same thing here by clicking in with index finger and then moving middle finger.

Other than click and drag I never use the physical click, tap to click is where it's at. OSX registers tapping much, much better than any trackpad I've tried with Windows.

What do you use right click drag for on OS X?

I have double tap set to right click and never really have issues. Then again I normally run a browser/terminal/emacs as my main apps so I don't really need/use right click at all that often.

To me two-finger tap is a natural action for "right click" or context.

Three-finger drag (which isn't on by default) is one of the best things about using a Mac imo. I honestly don't know how people live without on any platform. It's a huge improvement over double-tap-lock-and-drag or whatever the old way is.

Are you talking about Windows? Because I'm pretty sure OSX doesn't have any right mouse drag controls.

Xcode.

Oh, neat. I didn't even realize that Control-drag was the same as a RMB drag. That should make my life a little easier.

I don't see how right-click and drag could possibly be natural or easy on anything but a mouse.

Apple introduced multi touch to solve problems just like that.

It works perfectly fine if you have two mouse buttons below the trackpad (which every laptop I've ever had before my macbook has had).

With every tech company trying to imitate all of Apple's poor decisions, it is getting hard to find a laptop that has physical buttons. They have all been switching over to having just the trackpad.

How is it a poor decision? OS X generally has been designed to not need right clicking. And where it does, aka Xcode you can just do control click in most places.

I don't really see how this is a poor decision on apples part. For windows sure, right clicking abounds, though I'd argue that right there is the crux of the problem in general. The over reliance on right clicking in user interfaces I think isn't too far off from "magic track pad pawing motions like triple swipe etc...". But that last bits mostly my opinion on the matter.

My fundamental complaint is that Apple, as a company, prefers form over function. Avoiding right mouse clicks in the name of simplicity. Designing thin laptops instead of durable laptops. Restricting installation on iOS to just the App Store.

Me thinks you don't really understand the contrast between "form" and "function":

> Avoiding right mouse clicks in the name of simplicity

Simplicity has nothing to do with form, that is function.

> Designing thin laptops instead of durable laptops.

Thin/light laptops has nothing to do with form, that is function (who wants to carry around a brick?). And what is more durable than a MBP anyways?

> Restricting installation on iOS to just the App Store.

Security and safe experiences has nothing to do with form, that is function.

"Form" would be fashion, and Apple definitely has plenty of that, but all the points you listed don't focus on that.

For right-click-and-drag (something I do a lot in Xcode), hold down the control key – that simulates a right-click.

Try dragging 3 fingers instead.

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