No no, it does. Apple has bought trackpad company — was it FingerWorks? — that developed special HIDs for medical purposes. These things are a combination of pickup and signal processing, therefore hw and sw, that provides many extra layers of data that will contribute. Basic tracking will work out of generally understood signals, but the nuance comes from those that only proprietary sw can render.

I've been running Linux exclusively for over a decade on MacBooks and other laptops (flagship models from ASUS, HP, Lenovo) and I can tell you for certain it's the hardware. There may also be differences due to software, but if so, they're things I don't care about. The major thing for me is that I generally can't press to click on the other trackpads without immediately noticing that I have to press noticeably harder in some areas (eg: near the top) to register the click. On the MacBooks, it's absolutely consistent across the entire trackpad. Literally no other manufacturer seems to be able to do this. I hate using touch "tap" because it messes with typing, and no matter how good the software implementation of "disable tap when typing" it sucks. Pressing the trackpad gently and feeling the click, is the only way for me to use a trackpad.

In case you're wondering, this is because on the MacBooks it's not physically depressing at all - it's detecting a push and then generating haptic feedback that feels like a click. I wonder why PC manufacturers can't do this - patents?

Yep patents, but there was some recentish news that another company found another way to imitate those mechanics, so it might just come to other manufacturers as well soon.

Steam Deck does it already.

The haptic trackpads are a newer thing, though. I think introduced around 2013. Mac trackpads have been above the rest as far as I can remember, like 2000.

Haptic trackpad is the only reason I'm stuck with macs. other trackpad suck, pre-haptic Apple trackpads suck too.

It’s funny: I love the trackpad, but I forget that it’s haptic because I love tap to click so much that I almost never trigger the haptic feedback.

I probably have to push to click once every few weeks.

For me it's a game changer. I can move a cursor and click without removing my finger from the trackpad.

Really? I think it's more arguable that it's mostly/entirely software _today_, but there was a fairly long period where an Apple trackpad was a large glass thing whereas the average PC trackpad was a small thing made of soft plastic which didn't support multitouch at all. There clearly _was_ a major hardware gap, though I do think it's less clear there is today.