> That's my personal requirement. On a personal laptop I always use the trackpad so I want it to be the best.

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.

[1] https://github.com/wayland-project/libinput

> 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.

[0] https://github.com/marcan

Caveat: may not include an awesome trackpad driver.

If it includes a GPU driver, then the trackpad driver is trivial compared to that.

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...

True, but then why don't we have awesome Linux trackpad drivers for Intel Macbooks?

Isn't there a 1-2 year old project that claims to have made great trackpad driver behavior in Linux?

I think this is the case I remember:

https://bill.harding.blog/2020/04/26/linux-touchpad-like-a-m...

We don’t even have them for Bootcamp.

Apple’s trackpad driver is massive, I think. Do not underestimate the amount of detailed work that went into it.

Doing output is trivial compared to properly handling any type of free-form user input.

A GPU driver for a new undocumentated architecture is "trivial" compared to properly doing an input driver for a touchpad?

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...

It's because there is no great trackpad support outside the Mac. But there is good GPU support. So it seems, getting great trackpad support IS rocket science currently, for whatever reason. (I also wonder, what is going on there? I guess people on the other platforms just don't care about this detail, otherwise they would be on the Mac anyway).

There are a lot of crappy trackpads on crappy PC laptops, but the ones on the high-end laptops are quite serviceable even if not the ideal version that Apple created. With a serviceable trackpad, the other benefits of having a PC over a Mac tend to far outweigh the trackpad (for people that value what a PC brings).

Yes, I understand that, I am just not getting my head around why for example Windows is so bad with a trackpad either. I mean, how tough would it be for Microsoft to nail this if they cared?

They probably don't see it as their job. The fact that trackpad quality varies between makes/models implies that it's both a hardware and a software problem, the latter probably being drivers. Maybe there is something in the OS that hampers it though, I don't know. Would be interesting to hear from engineers at the OEMs. Frankly, when I read these comments about the problems of PC trackpads, it's like a foreign language to me. Problems with gestures, multi-touch or palm strikes.. I can't recall the last time I had a PC laptop with those problems. My XPS 2-in-1 9310 sits in a bag across the room and am typing on a four-five year old Lenovo right now, neither of which have any such problems. What I notice on the wife's MBP trackpad is the feel (glass) and the (good) lack of physical movement in trackpad - this lenovo is clearly a momentary switch and at the very upper end of the pad the force to needed to click is tougher, but it hardly matters. A tap accomplishes the same thing that a physical click does and is probably how I engage it most often. I'm just not sure it's as big a problem with decently-built PC laptops as people make it out to be. PC hardware has a lot more going for it that overshadows the delta between a 99% trackpad and a 94% trackpad. Things like a touchscreen, active digitizers, tablet modes, escape keys, function keys, facial recognition, variety.

I will never need a touchscreen in my laptop. That's what my iPad is for, which I can connect to my laptop, by the way. Function keys I've last used in the previous millennium, and I've got an escape key, thank you very much. My laptop automatically unlocks via my watch. But yes, I expect facial recognition to come to the Mac very soon, too.

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.

>I will never need a touchscreen in my laptop

We'll see how that ages, but rock on with your mac.

It's been that way for over a decade. It aged pretty well.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9TcJ45Y2z30

I imagine getting the trackpad right is either a giant pile of heuristic rules, or a nice tagged data set for ML, or both, maybe with a side of online learning from usage. A trackpad that automatically does the right thing for me coding, my 12 year old gaming, and my 8 year old with sloppy fine motor control does seem like rocket science to me.

I didn't mention this in my comment, but i use wayland on linux and i've found the touchpad experience to be nicer there compared to X11, even though both X11 and wayland sessions for Gnome use libinput. I don't know much about libinput to know why I feel a difference in my touchpad experience between X11 and wayland.

It has to be software. I have a ThinkPad that I recently installed macOS on (not advocating hackintosh, but it's a fun project nonetheless) and the trackpad feels every bit as good as a real Mac. Smooth scrolling, smooth gesture recognition, everything just feels good. The hardware is capable of processing the gestures, but the non-Apple software just does a terrible job of making it feel good to use.

It’s definitely not just software. If you connect an Apple Magic Trackpad to a Linux machine running X, it works way, way better than the garbage that’s built into most PC laptops.

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.

This is true, although it is probably because of the software being built into the trackpad itself.

I suspect the key software is in the firmware of the trackpad itself. The hardware does a lot of processing of the raw signals before it hands the data to the trackpad driver. The driver does additional processing, of course, but this also means that alternate trackpad implementations need more than just the right driver code. The firmware plays a key role.

> I suspect the key software is in the firmware of the trackpad itself.

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.

I have Intel MacBook Pro and the behavior of trackpad under Windows in BootCamp is just terrible while in a Windows VM or on a remote Windows desktop it is almost as good as on Mac. So I doubt it is in firmware.

It it software. As they did to ios, the MacOs has highest priority to all interface actions.That's why the scrolling on ios and MacOs is usually very smooth. The interface get the highest priority so if the computer is struggling with lots of simulaneous processes, the interface still will feel smooth. Very smart solution to prioritize UX. Why they didn't do the same on windows/android? No idea.

Also good defaults. In fact they don't even have certain settings in MacOS. For example you can't change the pointer acceleration, but the default one is just perfect.

Funny you say that. I'm a long-time MacBook Pro user, that migrated to Microsoft (!) Surface Go (!!) running Windows 10 (!!!) recently. Not only is the OS tolerable (after I figured how to prevent crashes ... I mean, automatic updates) and the device more convenient than any I've used before (a real computer in the iPad form factor), the trackpad is amazing as well, I truly don't notice any difference with MacBook Pro trackpad!

I care a lot too - but I care about a lot of other features, too, and refuse to buy Apple.

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.

Apple users buy Apple trackpads for their desktop. The Apple trackpad experience is better than a typical mouse, even when it comes to speed and precision.

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.

Not to dismiss your comment - my partner is an architect and also swears by the mouse to navigate in 3D - but I got an external trackpad when getting an external keyboard (to replace my poorly performing MacBook keyboard) and I have preferred the trackpad to a mouse for sometime. This is from someone who spends a lot of time in design software. I don’t think this is uncommon, either, although I’m not sure.

That's fair, but on my personal computer when I'm lounging on the couch, a mouse isn't going to cut it. I'm also talking specifically about laptops. Apple laptops have the best trackpad experience I've ever used. So my personal laptops will always be Apple until I find something better.

I'm guessing a big reason why it has never been prioritized is due to the difficulty of quantifying the impact of great trackpad UX (and as a result, the negative impact of the shitty trackpad UX every non-Apple device offers). Higher-ups don't like things that aren't easily quantified.

Don't understand the downvotes. I believe that it's exactly this. It's an industry where you can point to a competitor's machine and compare gigahertz and megapixels and terabytes and gigaflops and build press releases on those numbers, where an industry leader tries to make a point with "It doesn't run Rocket League!", where manufacturers like Dell can put a nice touchpad in one machine and then build twelve awful ones a year later because they have so many models on so many markets that no one is even able to say with confidence why certain models have been more popular than others.

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.

Fan noise is the same. I bought a machine from a Linux laptop vendor. At the time of purchase, I raised my concerns about the risk of ultimately ending up disappointed when it arrived (particularly how pricey it was). They insisted that I would be happy, and that it would be much better than my 5 year old laptop that I was replacing.

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 bought a Vostro 5301 (13" with 11th gen intel cpu) and the fan ran All. The. Time.

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).

It’s an interesting point. There must be some metrics i.e. latency, accuracy that a trackpad can be measured by

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 remember Wacom bragging about corporate secret quantitative measurement methodologies in Surface 3-4 era, but what completely solved pen computing stagnation was Microsoft dropping them completely and Apple Pencil casually stepping in, so,

I think it's got to be a little bit of both. My experience has been that the trackpad experience with Win10 on a MacBook is poor, and the trackpad experience on a hackintosh is also poor.

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.

I really don't get what is so special about all of these trackpad debates. Honestly if my trackpad can do a 2 finger scroll I'm happy. Worst trackpad I've used was on my x201, and was only terrible because it was tiny and insensitive.

It's very simple. Use an MBP for a few months, then switch back to another laptop and just see how long you last. I never used a trackpad at all until I got an MBP - always a mouse. Can't go back to that now. The one on MBP feels like a finely tuned instrument that does exactly what you mean it to do.

I'm a designer, and even on my work issued Macbook I had no issue using design programs like Sketch or Figma with the trackpad. It was really effortless and sometimes even after I got back to my desk where I had a mouse I'd still be using the trackpad for an hour after without even really realizing, it's that good.

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.

Would you consider using one of the trackpads you're happy with INSTEAD of a mouse? For non-precision work, that is. Browsing, navigating an IDE, clicking around the OS, stuff like that. In an emergency anything that does a two finger scroll and registers a click is okay, but would you enjoy using it for eight hours every day? Apple will confidently sell you a $5000 desktop machine with just their trackpad, because it is that good.

> Apple will confidently sell you a $5000 desktop machine with just their trackpad, because it is that good.

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...

The best trackpad I've used was on the Tegra K1-based Acer Chromebook 13. It had a good size for multi-touch gestures and was just really well integrated. Combined with a nice low-friction surface and a positive click, I still haven't found its equal.

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.

The hardware + software configuration for the majority of touchpads I've used on Chromebooks are on par or better than MacBook touchpads. It's just that people pretend they don't exist, whether in consumer complaints comparing MacBooks to everything else, or by the people responsible for freedesktop-based software who themselves continue purchasing terrible hardware and keep the software (drivers, userspace apps, etc) in the same sad state that it's always been in instead of copying what's happening with Chromebooks.

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.

There are so many people responding with incredulity to the fact that pc laptop makers haven't come up with a good Trackpad, but to me the reason is evident in the first interaction you have with any pc laptop manufacturer. Show me a pc laptop website that isn't an absolute horrific fucking mess, then find me a product on that website that doesn't look like a stupid broken plastic box thing, and then maybe we can start talking about trackpads. These companies seemingly want people to buy arbitrary products off the shelf and NEVER return. I'll grant that there may be a few notable exceptions, probably Razer is one, but the rest are abominations.

"I don't know if the problem is hardware, software, or both"

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.

I think that since they manufacture so many other touch devices that the software, data and or expertise in designing those devices transfers over into touchpads.

Apple had the best trackpads in the industry before they made the iPhone. That company just values good laptop design; after all, they invented it.

They invented what? laptops?

They invented good laptop design. Up until 2011, most laptops were shitty clones of the PowerBook Duo in terms of design. After 2011, most laptops became shitty clones of the MacBook Air.

Yup. The Powerbook 100 series is the first laptop with the classic clamshell design we all know.

Try looking for a laptop that doesn't have the terrible chiclet-style keys, it's impossible. Mac included

It is true. Or at least, in my experience, I have no data to contradict this.

It's funny that PC and Android can never reach the smoothness of Apple's touch pad and screen scroll when it's really the basic thing of computer usage where it matters.

Apple did it right 15 years ago and why do others still suck at it?

they don’t care. i’d love for someone to defend the idea that for all these years, microsoft has really wanted us to have first class touchpad experiences on their laptops, but they just couldn’t figure it out. A problem too hard, a bridge too far, an unattainable moonshot for however many hundreds of thousands of software engineers microsoft has employed over the years. so, once again, the reason it’s only that good on mac is because no one cares in the windows world, from microsoft to their developers and ultimately their customers who don’t value that feature. edit: i spend most of my life in linux but I have a mbp for photoshop and capture one. on many topics I hate my mac with a cold fury but credit where it’s due.

Am I really that unique in never having used the trackpad on a laptop at all, other than a last resort being forced to use some weird non-Lenovo thing without a nipple?

Always an external mouse in the backpack and the nipple as a fallback.

It's just that you've never had a laptop with a usable trackpad. I also carried a mouse when I had a Thinkpad.

I had macbook for two years and used external mouse way more than with my new thinkpad.

That thing on a macbook is so absurdly large that it's impossible to type without cursor doing some action.

> I'll never buy a non-Apple laptop until I can find one that has a trackpad as good or better

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.

Where's the fanboyism in that? They were commenting on a post about how most PC touchpads suck and that for some people a great touchpad is a requirement, the absence of which would prevent them from buying other laptops, such as the Framework Laptop.

> for some people a great touchpad is a requirement,

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.

A requirement, not THE [single] requirement. English isn't my first language but I believe that what I wrote is clear enough and you're playing dumb for some reason.

Where did he say that was the ONLY requirement? It's possibly the most important for him but unlikely to be the only requirement.

This is the best place to talk about that. There may be multiple suppliers of trackpads for the Framework and so they GP might finally have some choice.