Comment by bscphil | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bscphil | Hacker News Reader

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XPS trackpads have always been number one, from the very beginning. I'm working with a 10 year old laptop and its trackpad has performed flawlessly and is superior to any MacBook I've ever used (but especially older ones).

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.)

> Trying to hold down the giant button (which takes quite a bit of force) while trying to drag your finger... ugh. It's miserable.

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.)

Yes, your point is entirely fair. I should have clarified that I was talking about an older (mid decade) MacBook Pro. It requires enough force that, with my arm just positioned normally, I can actually feel the torque applied down the whole of my forearm.

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.

The latest iterations as I understand are like this:

- 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.

Force touch is useful feature last missing on other PCs.

On 2015 or later MacBooks, you can adjust the force required for a click: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204352 (“Adjust trackpad settings”)

This is software adjustable? That's very impressive engineering. Unfortunately this a 2014 MBP.

AFAIK the button doesn't actually move, it's like the home button on some older iPhones (like the 7). It detects the pressure and has a haptic feedback to make it feel like a button. If you look at a powered off iphone 7, the button is just an indent on the otherwise fixed glass panel.

Exactly. The most impressive part is that it really feels like a click, down to the illusion it's moving down (but it's not, at all). When powering off (or there's a crash), the feeling of it being immovable is surreal. Plus the surface is suddenly responding evenly (the clicking ones had a hinged design, so it became increasingly hard to click upwards the surface)

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.

[0]: https://github.com/niw/HapticKey

Another comment regarding the click and drag behavior.

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?

> 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.

As you say, the default mac os touchpad settings are somewhat strange to me.

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.

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