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Comment by zimpenfish | Hacker News Reader

> 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.)

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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.

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

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