EDIT: This isn't a generic "pro-Mac" dig, I want a nice PC laptop because I like dabbling with Linux; however, even the high end trackpads are clunky, even with the pre-installed Windows (never mind the eternal sadness that is Linux trackpad configuration).
100%. On my personal devices I don't want to compromise on trackpad or keyboards (I like that apple went back on the butterfly keyboards).
The rest of my comment is just my personal experience so take it with a grain of salt. I've found the trackpad experience on the XPS and Thinkpad X1 laptops to be excellent under linux. The libinput [1] drivers seem to work really well and the gesture support seems nice too. What I miss from MacBook's touchpad is force-touch. Not having to worry about which part of the touchpad i'm pressing was really nice when I used a macbook.
I'm contemplating purchasing a m1 macbook air as my next laptop, but I'm also not sure i'd be willing to give up on being able to run linux natively on a laptop I buy with my own money.
May I suggest sponsoring Hector Martin on GitHub[0]? He’s working on building first-class support for the M1 architecture (including drivers) into Linux.
Actually manufacturing the trackpad hardware might be difficult/expensive, but since that's already a given, the driver can be tweaked in tons of ways to fit the regular macOS experience...
I think this is the case I remember:
https://bill.harding.blog/2020/04/26/linux-touchpad-like-a-m...
You make "properly handling any type of free-form user input" sound like rocket science, when it's the regular multi-touch kind of driver we have on billions of mobiles, and laptops...
The "properly" here is just the sauce for macOS handling, not some inherent difficulty of "handling any type of free-form user input" on a 2D surface...
And I've never used a PC trackpad with satisfaction rate of > 30% ;-) They are all shite.
I guess it is just a matter of preference. As I said, if you care about the trackpad, you will never touch a PC laptop. If you don't, you think you have a 94% trackpad, and that it doesn't matter.
We'll see how that ages, but rock on with your mac.
Also note that Lenovo itself has a huge variation in trackpad quality. My relatively new thinkpad (thinkpad-branded but I think the model number was yoga 360) from work has a trackpad that is just barely usable. My personal yoga c740 has a trackpad that is actually pretty nice and gets close to MBP quality when it comes to movement/accuracy (it does still lack gestures and good right-click support though, and that is likely a software issue).
I really hope these guys pick good trackpads. I can grudgingly live with a stunted feature set (gestures etc) for now because I know X makes it difficult or impossible to get right, but I absolutely cannot abide a trackpad that feels shitty and inaccurate just for moving the mouse around.
What your parent comment (the comment you replied to) said refutes the reply you made.
They installed OSX on a ThinkPad, and observed the desired OSX-like trackpad behavior. Apple does not write firmware for thinkpad pointing devices, so it cannot be firmware-specific behavior.
My conclusion was to disable the trackpad and always carry an external mouse. I do a lot of CAD work and there's nothing that compares to a real mouse for speed and precision.
I'll use my Trackpoint nib in a pinch, but the trackpad ecosystem is so bad that I just write it off entirely. Yeah, keeping a mouse on hand is annoying, but it's like a physical keyboard: Would you ever buy a laptop where you had to input reams of text with a touchscreen keyboard? No, that's absurd, keyboards are a necessary part of a computer. Would you ever buy a trackpad for a desktop PC? I wouldn't, I'd use a mouse.
That's what happens when you're the most successful technology company in the world, and you hire the best engineers in the world and laser-focus them on thr user experience.
Design and UX-wise, the current laptop market is a shitshow and Apple seems to be the only company that consistently cares about the little things. Sure, they've messed up in the past (butterfly keyboards), but there is still a sense of progress.
Not only was that not the case, it was worse than my own pessimism that I started with.
The fan noise and the trackpad were so bad to the point that it felt like a joke, even though I knew it wasn't. People are just oblivious to this stuff and march onward none the wiser, even the people who should be doing things like comparative analysis on quality against their competitors' products.
I returned it after doing all the windows and driver updates, choosing "quiet mode" in the Dell Power Management software. The fan would kick on while cpu strolled along at 10 or 15%. Replaced it with an xps 13 which has been fine. (I have had several xps so decided to chance it).
Perhaps it needs to be a score via a user test e.g click these small randomly appearing boxes in the shortest time possible
I realize a sibling poster had a different hackintosh experience. I think that maybe supports my suspicion. Good hardware and good software are both necessary, but not sufficient, conditions of a good overall experience.
It even feels amazing, physically. It's smooth and your finger just glides right over it and still registers the touch with barely any pressure. The combination of the hardware, the size, and the software (drivers, OS, whatever else) is just the best I've ever used. Best of all, it's like that right out of the box.
For laptops, at least, I'm solidly Apple for the trackpad alone, I like it that much.
I mean... Apple will also "confidently" sell you four little castor wheels for 700 quid[0]. I'm not sure we should view their eagerness to take money off you as a sign of how great they are.
[0] https://www.apple.com/uk/shop/product/MX572ZM/A/apple-mac-pr...
In fact, that line of chromebooks had the best overall package. Slim, but very sturdy plastic body, a surprisingly good keyboard, ~10 hour battery life. The 13" FHD screen was OK, but not amazing, I would have liked an IPS panel instead of TN.
The major downside is that it was a 32-bit ARM-based chromebook and everyone was going 64-bit x86 instead. So it got slower and slower with each successive update, eventually it couldn't even play 1080p Youtube videos anymore, or even 720p60. Such a shame.
Look at Firefox for an example of the latter. I'm typing this on a Chromebook intended to run ChromeOS, but it's actually running Ubuntu. The touchpad experience from the factory is as good as it should be. When you wipe the machine and install Ubuntu and use Chrome, it's still pretty good. Running Firefox on the same system gives you its same janky scroll behavior that you get anywhere else that isn't a MacBook, for no good reason.
People act like there's some yet-to-be-understood law of nature that make MacBook touchpads good and everything else bad. This is demonstrably false. We have existence proofs to the contrary.
The gulf continues to be so big that after so much time of nobody else even appearing to try to compete, I assume it's patents.
Apple did it right 15 years ago and why do others still suck at it?
Always an external mouse in the backpack and the nipple as a fallback.
That thing on a macbook is so absurdly large that it's impossible to type without cursor doing some action.
Funny that
Commenting on a thread about a non-apple laptop that you'll never buy a Non apple laptop.
That is true and unadultered fanboyism.
The touchpad. Nothing else. Just the touchpad?
I'm not given to hyperbole but methinks there's a lot of info and technical requirements that go into purchasing an expensive item such as a laptop. Screen size and quality, keyboard quality, ports, batter life, weight, performance, looks - oh you know...normal stuff.
At least for us normal people. Maybe my mistake was there.
https://bill.harding.blog/2021/02/11/linux-touchpad-like-a-m...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26102894
Many millions of people will benefit, but the project only has 129 supporters, if anyone wants to chip in!
My solution has always been to just keep a wireless mouse with rechargable AA's in my backpack. If I'm using my laptop on a couch at home, I have a wooden lap desk with ample mouse space to accommodate it.
Additionally, the thinkpad I have now has both an eraser mouse and touch screen + stylus (as well as a trackpad), so if I do have to leave my mouse at home, I at least have options. I like the eraser mouse because I don't have to move my fingers away from the keyboard - and even if it feels it takes slightly longer to move - it's more pleasant tactile experience for me.
I strongly suspect most of the complaints about PC trackpads are a bit like Windows/Linux/Mac users complaining about the current font rendering on any of the others. I can't help wondering how much is just personal preference + a bit of echo chamber.
Unlike so many other brands. The vast majority I've used have been an endless stream of frustration and flakiness.
Edits to respond:
My point is that most tasks are either ① best done in a good text editing / development environment that works well with a specialized text input device — a keyboard — or ② would be better done with a specialized non-keyboard, non-trackpad input device (eg. a gaming mouse, graphics tablet, etc.)
⁰especially here on HN ¹including scrolling through PDFs and other documents ²or Zathura or less ³and/or/including PageUp/Down, Home, and End on luxurious large keyboards. Space and Shift+Space are okay on smaller ones.
Your point is only correct if you replace the word "most" with "my." The fact that trackpads are hugely popular indicates that your needs are not typical, and you should not impose your choices upon others with different needs.
would be better done with a specialized non-keyboard, non-trackpad input device
Show me a better multi-purpose input device that I can use to rotate objects on a screen. Or zoom into a specific object without affecting other objects on a screen. Or configure to have multiple hotspots that when tapped can trigger events or macros.
Again, trackpads aren't your thing. Good for you. Other people love them, and millions of people get real work done on them each day.
I agree with you in general, but a trackpad is in fact really, truly horrible for these tasks. As humans we are designed to rotate objects precisely, and that design does not involve using two fingers to slide about arbitrary locations on a flat plane. It involves grasping and rotating with the hand. For rotating and/or zooming, a large knob attached to a high-resolution encoder would be a million times better.
A common complaint around here is about how touch screens have taken away better tactile controls, but so have our keyboards.
The obvious answer to the challenge is a touchscreen.
I didn’t mean for it to be that exclusively. I tried to say that keyboards are the best text input device, but gaming mice and controllers are the best gaming input device, graphics tablets are the best graphics input device, and video editing input devices like the ones I linked in my original comment are probably best for video editing (while trackpads are at best decent scrolling/browsing devices, but IMHO I personally prefer keyboard scrolling like in the terminal pager less, the PDF and other document viewer Zathura, and vi-inspired browsers/browser plugins like luakit, qutebrowser, and Pentadactyl).
Obviously it's not as great if the measure you're looking at is "how quickly can I go back to typing?".
But Apple trackpads are not hugely popular, they have a fraction (~10%, likely less) of the global market. Does the fact that non-Apple computers are hugely popular indicate that the needs of Apple trackpad fans are not typical, and they should not extol their virtues to others?
> Show me a better multi-purpose input device that I can use to rotate objects on a screen. Or zoom into a specific object without affecting other objects on a screen. Or configure to have multiple hotspots that when tapped can trigger events or macros.
I’ve previously used a normal Apple mouse and keyboard to do all of these things in Adobe Photoshoshop and Illustrator on macOS and subsequently a random BestBuy mouse and ancient Compaq keyboard to do them in Gimp, Inkscape, and Blender on GNU (with xdotool for hot corners, which I’m counting as close enough to tapping hotspots). A graphics tablet would only work better.
> Again, trackpads aren't your thing. Good for you. Other people love them, and millions of people get real work done on them each day.
Again, non-Apple trackpads don’t seem to be your thing. Good for you. The majority of trackpad users use them every day.
You can as long as you can order x86 Macs with Bootcamp.
> No one is like, “I could have the Mac trackpad for the same cost, but I prefer the stuttery trackpad that moves the cursor and selects bleep when my palm gets too close”.
No, but there are plenty of people who think “I prefer no trackpad to accidentally swipe [—even if palm rejection is perfect, I want total hand —including finger— rejection—] at all”, from people who buy Macs and use the setting Apple provides to disable the trackpad when mice are plugged in, to people who use their Mac as a PC laptop and manually disable the trackpad (https://www.lakshmikanth.com/how-to-disable-trackpad-on-boot...), to people who try to more permanently disconnect broken old Mac trackpads (https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/386625/macbook-pro...), to people who physically disconnect their trackpads, to people who buy old thinkpads because eg. at least some x200s have only a trackpoint and fingerprint sensor.
If you've used a Magic Mouse, then you've used a mouse with a trackpad on its back. Glad you liked it!
And no, rotating in Photoshop with the keyboard isn't the same as rotating with a trackpad. It's an entirely different process that is significantly less efficient, unless you already know the exact angle of rotation you want down to the 0.1°.
My mistake. I used a standard Apple mouse (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Mighty_Mouse). I used its clickable scroll ball and squeeze functionality and suspect I would dislike the Magic mouse.
> And no, rotating in Photoshop with the keyboard isn't the same as rotating with a trackpad. It's an entirely different process that is significantly less efficient, unless you already know the exact angle of rotation you want down to the 0.1°.
IMO the ideal mouse + keyboard rotation style is Blender’s, which is more efficient in this scenario than a trackpad. But I still believe a graphics tablet would be objectively superior.
The person you're replying to said "trackpads are popular" with no mention of Apple. Your entire argument so far has been against trackpads in general. Why shift goalposts?
Yes.
https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/faqs/laptop-faqs/what-is-a-trac...
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/surface-trackpad-settings/...
http://support.blackberry.com/kb/articleDetail?articleNumber...
https://edgeup.asus.com/2019/the-asus-screenpad-2-0-lets-the...
https://wikidiff.com/trackpad/touchpad
Trackpad and touchpad are generic synonyms according to every source I can find.
I don't have the data but I think this is like the motherboard / logic board split. In other words "trackpad" may be Apple for "touchpad".
I gave you data by showing links where other companies like Blackberry, Lenovo, Microsoft, and Asus use the word "trackpad" themselves for their own devices. Lenovo even cutely capitalizes the P to fit their ThinkPad branding. You could also google around and see random people on reddit and elsewhere talking about the "trackpads" on their dells, hps, vaios, matebooks, and so on.
I'm not saying that "touchpad" isn't more common, but the evidence _clearly_ shows that "trackpad" isn't exclusive to Apple devices.
is a good description of what I feel reading PDFs efficiently, near effortlessly (which to me is near the same thing), and comfortably (also similar in that it involves minimal reaching, but also includes automatic semi-smart dark theming, easy good zooming, etc.) with Zathura.
So you want a specialized input devices for every task on a mobile device. That's an interesting choice. And I guess you also want to carry all these specialized devices around with you?
> browsing¹, which IMO should be a slightly glorified text task where Pentadacyl/luakit/qutebrowser/etc.² vi-style keybindings³ are best
Ok. Say you see a headline on HN that looks interesting, and you go to click on it. Wait, no, you...uhh...tab tab tab tab tab over to it and press enter to go to the comments page (like we all do) and start reading the comments. And, oh look, you want to respond to one of them. So you...uhh...tab tab...uhh...tab...tab tab tab tab tab tab tab...tab tab? Or you could just point and click.
Your proposed critical tasks of shifting the viewport and appending text to the current cursor location meet approximately 0% of computing user needs. The vast majority of all computer interaction is putting the cursor in the right place in the first place. The keyboard is terrible for that, external devices encumber portability, vertical touch screens require significant muscle control and effort, and trackpoints drift and do fewer things while being worse at all of them.
Please take a minute to type the name of any of the browsers I named into your favourite search engine or package manager and return when you know what we’re talking about. (This comment was made via Pentadactyl).
> The vast majority of all computer interaction is putting the cursor in the right place in the first place.
This is why it pains me to use browsers where I can’t tap [count]gi to focus input fields.
Enlighten us all. What exactly did you press and what mental decision and awareness process was required to do it starting from the front page?
> [count]gi
"[count]" sounds like one would need to know how many like things on the page precede the thing you're trying to get to. Thanks but no thanks. 150! Oops, 100! Oops, 130!
EDIT: Here's an extremely low quality screencast of me making this comment
>fu (click 'reply') >ff (select textbox) >ESC (deselect textbox) >fg (click 'reply')
and a lot easier- not to mention, less RSI-inducing- than mucking around with a mouse, or trackpad, or trackpoint, trying to aim a little cursor at a little box multiple times in a row.
In insert mode I may use the simple mixture of emacs/readline and CUA bindings — like ^w to wipe the last word, ^a to go to the beggining of the line and ^e to go to the end (eg. when inserting a > before a blockquote, then appending my commentary) — to write a straightforward comment from beginning to end, or I may use ^i to pop the field open in my $EDITOR (vis), where motions like m to mark my place, G to go to the end, o to open a new line, and M to return to my mark are useful for comments that might be written non-linearly, eg. if they have footnotes. I can save and exit vis (if I use it) with ZZ, and submit the comment with standard CUA <Tab><Enter>.
If I reference any other material then Pentadactyl’s browsing bindings like go«character» to open a quickmark, s to search, p or P to paste my X11 primary selection as a search term or the url of a current or new tab, b to fast-as-you-type search through tabs, y to yank the current website, ;y«number and/or title of link to yank» and d to delete a tab are useful (along with standard X11 Shift+Insert to paste the primary selection in insert mode).
Ideally though, I should use Pentadactyl only for browsing — for scrolling through and reading web documents — and have a dedicated newsreader that understands what posts, comments, etc. are and could make this several times more efficient. I’m currently dipping my toes in evil-mode emacs, which should enable this. I’ve recently spent less time on HN and more on IRC where I do have a dedicated native client that makes things orders of magnitude more smooth than trying to use a web client in my browser.
> f20 selects this discussion (the 20th link) but I used f4<Enter> to select threads (the 4th link)
So first you have to visually recognize every link in between the beginning and what you want to choose and then you have to count them all? I hope you don't miscount!
> j,D, and <Space> scroll down by a line, half-screen/page and full-screen/page respectively
How many lines, half-pages, or pages is it from the top to here? Just curious.
> fr4 selects the correct reply (the fourth link whose text begins with r);
So first you have to decide that "starts with r" is a good heuristic for getting where you want to go and then you have to find all of the links that start with r and count them?
> gi goes to the first input field and enters insert mode
But if it's not the first input field, then you have to count them or cycle through them?
> Ideally though, I should have a dedicated newsreader that understands what posts, comments, etc. are
So now you want a special bespoke reader for every website?
Oh yes this all sounds so much easier than just pointing at the thing you want! Thank you for clarifying.
> Just curious.
But I sincerely doubt it’s true based on the tone of your comment. I’m willing to walk through each sentence with you, but as I have already sunk significant time into trying to help you I politely request that you first prove my doubt unfounded by investing five minutes in grabbing luakit, qutebrowser, or Pentadactyl — or at the very least a WebExtension attempt at emulating them like SurfingKeys — with your favorite package manager/browser and trying it out for yourself.
Edit: However I will walk through the sentences for the sake of the other people reading this thread in better faith, to respond to the strongest [weakly] plausible interpretation of your comment, although text is a worse medium for learning GUIs than video which is worse than first hand interactive use.
> So first you have to visually recognize every link in between the beginning and what you want to choose and then you have to count them all? I hope you don't miscount!
No, the browser automatically highlights them in a style of your choice (I use a gruvbox theme) and visually numbers them for you. You can also just begin typing any part of the link’s title and it will be selected when you’ve typed a subset unique to it.
> How many lines, half-pages, or pages is it from the top to here? Just curious.
~3 out of 4 screens on my threads right now. But note that I scrolled down one piece at a time and only know this because my bottom status bar happens to display it (as well as the url, mode, a minus or plus signifying pages back or forward in the tab’s history, on a background that signifies the SSL status of the site).
> So first you have to decide that "starts with r" is a good heuristic for getting where you want to go and then you have to find all of the links that start with r and count them?
No, you don’t need to use a heuristic but it saves reaching your left hand to the number row to eliminate half a dozen links by typing fr instead of just typing f10.
> But if it's not the first input field, then you have to count them or cycle through them?
No, you can use ;i to select fields the same way you select links, but it hasn’t taken me the months I’ve been using HN to notice all top-level discussion pages have exactly 2 input fields: one to add a top-level comment and one for the Algolia search (gi or 2gi will instantly teleport you to and insert you cursor in the first or second one respectively).
> So now you want a special bespoke reader for every website?
No, I want a native client for each type of software: a browser for browsing (exploring and reading) web documents, a news reader for news, an IRC client for internet real-time chat, a mail client for mail, a media player for playing media (I copy links and use a sxhkd binding to open them in MPV — https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24509028), etc.
The development¹ has been continued by the community after Firefox removed support for XUL extensions.
¹Well, tbh basic maintenance is a more accurate term — the updates have been minor, and the patch that enables it in the latest version of Palemoon hasn’t been pushed to the addon store yet, you have to clone from master at the moment.
What do you do when the browser doesn't highlight something interactive?
What do you do for, as one person on the web calls it, "fancy javascript shit"? What if you want to draw an iceberg to see how it would float?
I have been using a similar plugin for years and on a very rare occasion I’m using my touchpad to do something as you described.
Because most people don't use vim and mice aren't usable unless you're sitting at a flat surface with the room to hold one. If I'm using my laptop on the couch, a trackpad is probably the best solution. (Trackpoint gave my index finger RSI, when I was was being careful.)
Trackball mice a good solution to this problem. I had work on a bed without a table for 2 weeks last year, and a trackball mouse ended up working great (I didn't like using the trackpad, since switching from the keyboard to trackpad on a laptop is fairly uncomfortable if you do it often enough).
Trackpads were a great upgrade to laptops when they happened, even though at the time, excessive moisture screwed up the trackpad, to the point that I needed to have a dime handy to put my finger on for a half hour after getting out of the shower.
(Source: I've used mac portables since the PB 100, including most of the major versions)
Switching from the keyboard to something an inch away is uncomfortable for you, but switching from the keyboard to something a foot away is not? I don't get it.
Additionally, when I'm using it on my lap, the trackpad is basically next to my body, which makes my wrist position a little uncomfortable.
Looking back, I think it's not really the switching, but rather the comfort when using one for a prolonged period, for which I found the trackball easier.
See https://imgur.com/a/qeRQIFD
An offset trackpad would also work, though obviously would be less friendly to lefties.
Please search the web for "trackpoint drift".
It may be that I've become more zen/accepting, because I'm sure a mouse or trackpad can be more precise pointing tools, but it's worth it for the connection. Input is all about the keyboard and mouse, and the proximity just makes so much sense, especially when using vim mode. I could imagine better systems where typing with a keyboard is still the main input, but they would all involve not taking my hands off the home row.
Funny, because I see people complaining about it still in 2020 on brand new Thinkpads. See for instance https://www.reddit.com/r/thinkpad/comments/ken18b/does_your_... and the comments saying "They all drift, it's inherent by the sensor design", "It drifts on all my ThinkPads too", "Mine sometimes drifts".
So unless your definition of modern is "ones that haven't been released yet", I think you might be wrong.
Also agree that detached keyboards and mice will almost always be superior to their on-board counterparts.
But, I think we're being a wee bit cognitively dissonant if we tell ourselves notebook keyboards and trackpads don't receive a non-trivial amount of use--even from the best of us.
Even more, why are keyboard and external-mouse purists even bothered with even owning a laptop if they rarely/ever intend to use the most major distinguishing features that separate them from desktops in the first place?
But even if you don't agree with any of that, why shouldn't we still demand a damn-good version of a highly ubiquitous tool, even if we don't personally use it that often? (Especially since Apple has proven that it's possible.) On HN (and the rest of the dev community) are perhaps the most demanding critics of anything technology. "Server starts up 8% slower!--dogshit!" "New release consumes 5% more memory--are you kidding me!" "Battery lasts 25m shorter--I'm in tears!" "The new theme is highly disruptive to my workflow--OH THE HUMANITY."
I'm not being critical of our being sticklers. We should be! That's our job! Our fellow devs care about quality; our users care about quality. We should care about what our users care about. We have the voices and power to advocate for good products for all that use technology. The trackpad will be a major way people interact with computers for a long time to come and I'm not prepared to hand-wave away the mediocre.
Because it's nice to be able to use my laptop without having to find a tabletop and dig out my mouse. In bed, on the couch, on a bus, as a passenger in a car.
Smartphones have taken over a lot of those situations, but a small laptop is still much better for a lot of tasks. I don't use Macs anymore, but their touchpads are actually as precise as a good mouse, and it just feels really nice.
Same thing with knobs and graphics tablets, though it's not a use case I have personally. A dedicated peripheral is probably more powerful and precise, but sometimes it's nice to use your laptop from your lap.
And having tried Apple touchpads, they are actually good, so much that they released a standalone version for desktop computers. On every PC I have tried, at best, they provide you with a pointing device in case using a mouse is impractical. I don't intend to buy a Mac for several reason but I have to admit that their trackpads are not in the same league.
Or, it's close enough that with hovering hands you can move back and forth between keys without looking. It's much faster to navigate a code base that way, I think, than trying to jump in vim lines at a time. A smooth, continuous scroll at easily controllable, different speeds does wonders for keeping continuity of a file in mind.
This is why I like having not just ^f/b full page, {}() paragraph and sentence, and of course j/k line scrolling but also ^u/d half-page scrolling so much that I mapped them it U and D in Zathura and Pentadactyl just for the centimeter of finger movement that saves.
¹Let me test that. I like digraphs a heck of a lot more than scrolling through a symbol list btw. This was also a nice use for marks.
¿Por que no los dos? Seriously, I wasn't talking about replacing my keyboard with a trackpad. They are different devices with different purposes and are intended to be used together.
My XPS has the advantage of two physical buttons for left and right click. They require just the right amount of force to press (like a slightly softer mouse button with deeper travel). It makes dragging things around (which I do a lot because I don't use a tiling window manager) very easy. Which doesn't feel like something I should have to comment on, but doing this on a MacBook is pure suffering. Trying to hold down the giant button (which takes quite a bit of force) while trying to drag your finger... ugh. It's miserable. Because of the physical buttons I can actually play some games on my XPS without needing an external mouse (or putting up with misclicks)
In terms of hardware, what people are looking for is mostly surface feel, size, features. It's the former where cheap laptops fall down. Most of the ones I've used really suck, actually. Some of them are bad enough that the manufacturers actually texture the surface to try to slow your finger down, I guess because the accuracy of the touchpad isn't very good. High end touchpads like the one on the XPS or MacBooks have flawless feel: extremely low friction surfaces.
It's not commonly noticed, but software contributes at least as much to how a trackpad feels as hardware. Given the limitations of its hardware, I have no quarrel with Apple's software quality. (Though the defaults are weird, like not being able to tap-to-click. They really want you to have to use that damn button.)
Windows has historically sucked at this. I've seen about half a dozen trackpads that seemed absolutely terrible, and no Windows settings could make them better. After moving them over to Linux (on the synaptics driver) they suddenly became quite okay to use, even if the hardware was crappy. I'm afraid this era might be ending, sadly. I've had nothing but bad experiences with libinput. It lacks the kind of configurability you need to improve on the performance of a bad touchpad. (It's even quite bad under Wayland for the XPS touchpad - you can't set the combination of low speed, high acceleration that feels natural to me for this touchpad.)
Not wishing to detract from your personal experience but "quite a bit of force" is at odds to mine - on this M1 MBP, it takes less force to activate the trackpad click than it does to activate a keypress. And once you've clicked, you can use a second figure to drag; no need to try and drag with the force finger (I use my thumb to click for power*, then index to drag for accuracy.)
One thing I would definitely expect a recent migrant to apple trackpads to experience as negative would be "force click". The apple trackpads sense force in some analogue way and if you push hard enough you can activate another action called force click. It's ridiculously easy to activate on accident when holding click while dragging -- but this "feature" can be turned off (and probably should be for most people I'd wager).
I've never tried using the middle finger for dragging -- seems awkward but i'll give it a try ... won't that activate the two finger drag operation?
No, because you've clicked which makes it a different operation than just two fingers scrolling or zooming.
My understanding is that Apple has made the clicks much lighter in their later models - along with doing the exact same thing with the keyboard keys, which for me goes much to far in the other direction.
- keyboards were reverted similar to how they were around 2015. - all the new trackpads are don’t require a physical actuation to activate. You can apply the same amount of minimal pressure anywhere on the trackpad and it “presses back” at you to simulate a physical click. It’s quite convincing.
One can leverage the haptic feedback to make the TouchBar a bit more lively[0]. The illusion breaks a bit since the haptic device is farther away from the touch surface but it's still quite a transformative experience for the TB.
But the touchpad can be configured for the bottom side of the touchpad to function as buttons: if you touch it directly, it won't register as mouse movement. If you press on the left, it's a left button, right is a right button. So while not actual physical buttons, it's pretty damn close. I don't actually use this so not sure houw this would work out in practice for your needs.
Regarding the dragging situation, there's another setting that's now been buried in "Accessibility" for some reason, but that was present in the touchpad settings before: "drag hold".
This allows you to lift the finger from the touchpad for a brief period while dragging without stopping the dragging. This, to me, is the pinnacle of touchpad experience. You can start dragging wherever you want on the pad and go as far as you like, you never run out of space.
There's also a similar option that some people like: three-finger drag. It works like scrolling, except that if you use three fingers it starts dragging.
In fact, I think I like the trackpad on my cheap Logitech K400 just as much as the Macbook, I'd be hard pressed to point to a significant problem with either.
Two-finger scrolling on the K400+ is painful. (Actually physically painful; I have RSI in my right arm and poorly-tracking touchpads can be a trigger.) It requires fairly heavy pressure on the touchpad to trigger gestures consistently (though they can be triggered inconsistently with light pressure which is also frustrating). And especially on macOS, it's difficult to actually scroll a consistent distance with a two-finger gesture with the K400+.
I'm fairly certain this has to do with the K400+'s touchpad not being recognized as a touchpad by the OS. The device is instead emitting mouse wheel events in firmware when a two-finger scroll gesture is detected. macOS will then, of course, apply mouse wheel acceleration, which makes sense for some mice but absolutely does not make sense for a touchpad.
I've been using Linux exclusively on ~5 different laptops of varying quality the last few years and I haven't been able to relate to the frequent comments about trackpad support being poor - not sure if it's just I don't use it that much, or don't realize what I'm missing since I haven't used a modern macbook.
My biggest gripe applies to all laptops and that's the insufficient ram offered on most models - IMO 16gb should be the baseline, and 32gb approaching normal with the demands of current software (yes software could be more efficient but this isn't the reality we find ourselves in)
That's what I thought as well, but every time I try to use my colleagues Mac it's a struggle, movement speed is really weird as it's not linear, tapping doesn't behave as one would expect (never had a problem with Linux or even windows with that). The whole thing is a weird button which presses when I don't want to.
True, I have used it maybe for 10 mins in total in.my life, so that's probably the main issue (I hope for the sake of the people who actually use it).
On the other hand I have seen long time users and it makes me cringe. What a pain, learn some shortcuts and use it for random text selection only.
It really shouldn't be linear. That would force you to make unnecessary tradeoffs between precision and the ability to get the cursor from one side of the screen to the other in just one or two swipes.
> tapping doesn't behave as one would expect (never had a problem with Linux or even windows with that). The whole thing is a weird button which presses when I don't want to.
Tap to click is an option that can be toggled on and off, on every trackpad I've ever used. Additionally, Apple trackpads since 2015 let you adjust in software the amount of force required for a press on the trackpad to register as a click.
> What a pain, learn some shortcuts and use it for random text selection only.
I can just as easily turn this around: configure and learn a few multi-touch gestures and you won't have to keep moving your hand off the trackpad to perform keyboard shortcuts.
Conflating novice users with mac users seems a bit unreasonable, especially given how many people have used both at various times.
If you run linux on the XPS this project (https://github.com/iberianpig/fusuma) is great for configuring multi-touch gestures that work like the Mac.
Of course, asking people to trust that long-term calculus for a new product from a new company is nontrivial.
> 4TB or more of Gen4 NVMe storage
Suggests to me that this will be targeted at the "money is no object" market. (And it might still be something you don't need, I keep all my media on a server, so 1TB would be more than sufficient, thank you very much.)
Compaq vs Sun:
I was the IT Director for Decide.com in ~1998-ish and we had a bunch of compaq servers and a bunch of SUN servers...
At the time - SUN was *giving* servers to startups to adopt their HW.
I had to build out a ton of systems in various DCs and the SUN machines were not rack-mountable, but were like $50,000 a unit... and they had this *security* feature where-by the machine would not boot up if the external case was not properly put on...
BUT - I could rebuild a compaq server in the dark with my eyes closed. I had a compaq engineer who was delivering a replacement server and watched me rebuild that machine in no time.
The thing was that the engineering of the compaqs was so consistent and well done that it took single digit minutes to rebuild an entire 4U machine vs the behemoth SUNS that bitched when their cover wasn't properly sealed.
Also, $50,000 sounds like a lot of money. Was that price considered giving it away?
For a server in the 90's, it sounds pretty cheap to me.
Apple's Xserves started at $3,000, and I've read they were considered underpowered. Sun was a premium company for heavy lifting.
The company I worked for at the time was into Silicon Graphics, and those machines were five figures a pop just for desktops.
One small note on SGI - the 02 had a "feature' that cost you ~$2500 extra for access to a particular port - can recall if it was USB or Serial or what not, but you had to pay for this port...
But this port was just blocked by a plastic cover - EVERY machine had this port/ but they were covered by a plastic cover.
The $FEE that you paid was to simply have SGI remove the plastic cover on top of the port.
The 02 was an extremely over priced piece of shit and the only reason it existed was to have Softimage and Maya run on MIPS
Avid was later based in seattle - but it was based on tech that LucasFilm invented - as was CG rendering called "the death star" which Steve Jobs bought from George for $10,000,000 and turned it into pixar.
George didnt think that CGI was going to be profitable, hence selling to Jobs.
Source: on the Presidio design team, I designed a majority of their data center in that facility - and had designed a cable interconnect matrix with the design requirement that any given workstation in the four-building facility could be made a render node when the engineer was not at desk (so at night)
Lots of crazy experiences from that --
1. being asked why I couldnt provide power over fiber
2. Being asked if I could design a facility in Singapore because paying "us Prima donnas" was too expensive when they could pay asian animators far less for the same work
3. Having see them in-bed with Force 10 networks
4. Seeing all their equipment stolen from the parking garage after delivery but before installation into the data-center by some construction guy
5. Them turning down my initial datacenter design which made it look like the inside of the death star. Telling me they hated it.
6. Watching the power struggle as the then CFO took control of the empire as Lucas stepped away.
7. Watching the distaste of all the employees as Lucas sold for four billion dollars to disney, but his accomplished and skilled staff got basically nothing because they didnt own stock in the company they built for lucas.
Yeah - fuck george lucas.
Edit: in hindsight it was a terrible marketing strategy. It meant that 100% of new customers had budget left over to spend on risky whitebox machines.
I have fond memories of an AMD Linux cluster that ran circles around a Sun workstation. The workstation cost 10x more than the entire cluster.
OMG do you want to hear war stories about SGI?
Turning SGI machines into keg-or-atores at Lucasfilm when consolodatiting to the presidio when all these Octanes and others were at ILM in Marin?
Yeah - many a machine was turned into a bar...
Heck the team building exercises at FB were to "build a bar for your team..."
Are Presidio and "the death star" you referenced above related to RenderMan? I've done research on hardware for image processing (https://aetherling.org/), so it's interesting to hear about these systems.
For me I have 3 concerns: 1. I'd never use a 13" laptop it's too small for work for me. Any chance of a 15" version? It'd be also cool if it could be used to light gaming (e.g. an Nvidia 1650 included)
2. Pricing. If this will be priced as Macbook pros you will have a very niche segment as customers (basically silicon valley tech people)
3. As I'm in the EU shipping needs to have a sane price (I can understand if this is not the priority at the start)
Also looking forward to AMD or ARM instead of Intel.
I, personally, am tired of the brushed aluminum with black bezels and keyboard look. The materials can remain the same, but some colored options would be wonderful - like the HP Spectre x360's with blue and black options, etc.
Everything else looks wonderful, particularly the mobo upgrades for newer CPU/GPU combinations... and even better - getting to choose the ports I need! Love that!
Extra colors add cost. You have to plan for which colors might be popular, and which won't, in which case you'd have to sell at a discount to get rid of inventory. I'd be surprised if Framework offered that out of the gate.
Apple literally has buildings filled with thousands of CNC machines milling aluminum laptop cases.
Apple does not manufacture things the same way as the rest of the industry, as they have the money and the scale to do whatever the fuck they want.
https://beneinstein.medium.com/no-you-cant-manufacture-that-...
If it came in certain tasteful colors, that would get my wife to switch from Apple to Linux. (She works in the fashion industry.)
While it's commendable that framework is picking those materials to environmentally conscious - I have had such terrible past experiences with "aluminum" body laptops triggering eczema outbreaks[1] - that I avoid metal cases as a rule now.
[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/291384767_Allergy_r... TLDR: many metallic cases have nickel or cobalt present, and it releases when you sweat. Sometimes this triggers contact dermatitis (eczema) if you're sensitized to it.
That said, when I had the option to get a laptop where I wouldn't have to think about it at all (plastic cased thinkpad), I jumped for it. Maybe I've just developed a deep-seated, emotional resentment for metal bodied laptops in general after spending so long dealing with itchy/oozy hands, wrists and forearms. Also all the doctors who just prescribed steroid creams and blamed stress...
You're also not in the majority, but as I stated, I'd prefer a non-metal looking laptop. I've got a Razer Blade Stealth 13 which I had to put a skin on because it's a fingerprint magnet. Skins really aren't that bad, and they're designed to not block the vents.
Not everyone has skin allergies, but if you are mass producing devices that will be in close contact with skin for long durations, made with metals that are well known to cause skin irritation - sooner or later you're going to run into people that are affected.
So while I'm "rare", in that I know I've got an allergy with a very noticeable reaction that can be triggered by laptops - many people don't know that they are at risk of developing it, even though they are. Or maybe they know they have a nickel sensitivity (this issue is very common with people who wear cheap jewelry) - but they don't know a laptop can trigger it.
Unless there's a big push to do some sort of widespread contaminant testing on laptops, I imagine this issue will grow if metal-body laptops continue to be the norm.
~ typed on a Lenovo T440s (4GB soldered RAM unfortunately): swapped the touchpad for the one from the 450s, replaced the fan, after it made noises, started with a tiny m.2-SATA, then upgraded to a spare SATA from the Desktop, updated the screen after it broke. Now the bottom shell has a dent in it (full backpack) but I think I'll let it pass. Still seems pretty repairable to me.
More and more developers in big tech companies using Linux just expect it to work and aren’t interested in monkeying around with drivers and configs.. not to say they can’t, but why increase friction for your dev setup?
This is one of the reasons why the XPS 13 Developer edition exists. Guaranteed first party support for Linux.. you know the next kernel or major revision won’t Bork your setup... you can just focus on working within the env.
Offering a preinstalled Linux variant captures the market referenced above, and signals to tinkerers that this is a good platform to build on since all hardware is supported without jenky workarounds.
Alternatively, if you can’t make offering dedicated Linux installs an economically feasible thing, then perhaps offer a mirror or set of instructions to set up latest LTS builds of various Linux flavors, to indicate full compatibility? Because that is the real selling point. Knowing all of your hardware is supported as a first party product. That’s one of the biggest reasons why I chose an XPS this time around, and considered a System76 machine as well.
That said, I think offering Linux pre-installed would be very nice as a signaling function to attract technical-minded users.
This may be projecting myself onto others but I wonder if that's actually true, and I would indicate the Dell and Lenovo Linux options as evidence.
I personally run Linux on my laptop to reduce pain and time spent doing unnecessary maintenance - I run Fedora on a Lenovo and it works seamlessly. If I bought a Framework, it would be for upgradability and maintainability rather than for customisation.
I undertand in 99.9% of cases people just want to buy a laptop, turn it on and have it working. But I also think there should be an easy way to opt out of Windows enforced by law so that MS don't bang up numbers due to shady commercial practices.
FWIW, I'd be much more interested in your products as a solid platform for running Linux than whatever junk MS is including in Windows 10 this week anyway. But sometimes small issues can say a disproportionate amount about where a business really stands on some issues I care about, and things like having control over my own hardware and software for reasons ranging from longevity to privacy are high on my personal list.
Also, will you consider establishing an EU warehouse to reduce shipping and customs overhead?
Good luck!!!
Ouya and the Essential phone are two cases that immediately spring to mind where the founding teams were credible, but the products ended up being massive flops.
Good luck to them anyway. The idea is cool and I think if I were on the lookout for a Linux laptop and they delivered on their quality promise, I'd consider them.
Still, I haven't lost my optimism just yet. As you say, good luck to Framework with the laptop project.
Already many laptops you can easily swap parts like the HDD/SSD, Battery and RAM, and even the GPU (to an extent) if its using a standard like MXM. Building a laptop with more modular parts using existing standards (looks like from the images the modular parts are using USB C Thunderbolt?) is much more doable than a modular phone.
For the older models, even screen replacements are quite common in the ThinkPad community...
Good luck for this project though, we really need more companies like this!
USB 3, and Thunderbolt are also complete disasters power consumption wise, not to say that Type-C, and Thunderbolt chips cost arm, and a leg.
- It comes with quite the price tag, adding connectors everywhere gets expensive fast.
- Some interfaces are very tricky to modularize, RAM & CPU are very closely linked, and it’s very hard to protect them from ESD.
- Which generally points you to the PC solution, don’t protect it, enclose everything and standardize.
There’s also the more “business” part of modular electronics. PC parts are only cheap through massive volume, but building a modular phone requires you to (mostly) build all of your parts. The only way to make it feasible requires more than one device using the same modules, which defeats the uniqueness of the device.
Laptops are way more feasible just because that modularization is already on the market, and you don’t need to build your own RAM SODIMMs or SSDs.
This thing though, I can kind of see it working.
Basically: The pressure to minimize volume + weight is way too high for a mobile phone to become modular. Then add recent requirements like IP68 ratings.
In a laptop there's still some breathing room for modularity. And noone expects a laptop to survive an accidental drop into a pool.
(Tangentially related: I don't really understand why Apple doesn't include this feature, even though they use OLED screens.)
There isn’t a huge amount of ready to use phone hardware from multiple competitive consumer suppliers I feel like integrating into a phone myself.
But there are those things for a laptop.
If they can make this work at a reasonable price it would be appealing even to me as an ardent Mac user.
I haven't read the details of this specific laptop in the OP but I have seen similar projects go nowhere. What usually happens is the product ends up a lot more expensive and lower quality than a mass produced laptop and the project doesn't live long enough to release a second gen of hardware.
It would make more sense for me to buy 2 Dell XPS laptops over the next 10 years that to buy this hobby project and if I even can, buy the upgrade kit.
A small hardware project on its own might be doable.
But even then, they're tackling a very hard problem. Branding, manufacturing, quality assurance, distribution... So many things can go wrong.
I'm not making a prediction but I'm with Ars Technica in the "healthy skeptic" camp. I do hope they beat the odds.
What they are promising sounds awesome. And AS a Brit, that is not a word I use often :)
I really, really hope this pans out, and this summer - this is something I'd very much like to get my hands on!
They should avoid the appeal to authority fallacy. Those companies hire tens of thousands of people each. Statistically speaking, half of them could be idiots. Just because I worked at Cisco doesn't mean I'm some product genius. (Hell, I came from an acquisition!)
Read: please send us a free one
now let's have a pocket variant that revives the old google modular project
Maybe its me but I suspect they're referring to decade old ThinkPad that have since evolved a lot to thin performance beasts.
Passive aggressive remarks towards things your target market holds nostalgia for is likely not going to end well.
It's also setting themselves up for failure if their cooling solution doesn't beat a modern ThinkPads dual fan solution.
The aluminium case is also extremely questionable. Is your target demo thinkpad users or Dell users that want to take things apart. Hate to break it to you but Dell users don't give a fuck. It's why they have a Dell. Most think pad users value plastic chassis. They're lighter (13" at 1.3kg, are you nuts?) more durable, and more palatable on your lap when they warm up they're also more cost effective.
Dell started soldering RAM in the past couple of years though, so if this thing exists when I next need to buy a laptop and it remotely justifies its high price I'd be interested.
This project looks unbelievable! I am super excited for this, as many many others are too obviously. I’ll be honest I’m not even going to click on the Ars Technical article, their opinion couldn’t be less interesting to me.
No doubt this company still has a lot to prove. Can they put their money where their mouth is? Remains to be seen.
But the fact that there is a real company out there, making an attempt to build a product like this makes me so happy.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/02/framework-startup-de...
Edit to add quote from Ars article:
Framework is promising an awful lot in its very first product—"thin as an XPS 13, repairable as a custom-built gaming PC" is a pretty tall order to live up to. We very much want to believe, but it's going to take a full Ars Technica teardown before we're completely convinced.
Although we're skeptical, we are hopeful—the fledgling company does have a pretty solid pedigree. Framework founder Nirav Patel was Oculus VR's head of hardware from 2012 to 2017, and he was a Facebook director of engineering beyond that. The company's team also includes design, engineering, and operations people hailing from Apple, Google, and Lenovo.