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Comment by dereg | Hacker News Reader

A few things off the top of my head:

- Mac touchpads have near-perfect wrist detection so you almost never get an errant input.

- There is virtually no input lag. It’s especially crucial when scrolling long pages. On a Mac, you can flick the touchpad and the page will scroll all the way down.

- Furthermore, they perfectly recognize up to 10 fingers. There’s a lot of great software that allows you to set shortcuts to different mouse gestures like 3-,4-, 5-finger swipes, tip-taps, and more.

- There’s a really smooth acceleration curve that allows you to be extremely precise with the mouse while also allowing it to span great distances when needed.

Like the other poster said, there are so many subtle differences that amount to a gargantuan delta between the two experiences.

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I don't know what is a "wrist detection". Nobody put his wrist on a touchpad anyway, there is simply no practicable way to do that when operating a laptop, even when trying to!

I don't perceive any lag on both my thinkpad and my pro admitedly crappy Dell laptop on Linux when scrolling anything and I don't recall having felt a significant difference with windows when it was last fired up or on Mac laptops I tried in the past. Most of the difference usually came from a difference in the speed and acceleration settings but these are configurables.

Can't speak about gestures because that is something most people don't use.

You do.place your wrist on the trackpad when typing and it needs to reject that input.

That is untrue.

1. when I type only the tip of my fingers enter in contact with the laptop, my wrists are in the air.

2. if I rest my hands on the laptop they sit on both side of the trackpad, not on it.

You’re not everyone.

So I guess "everyone" is happily and actively looking to get carpal tunnel syndrome.

You do on Macs because Apple has made the trackpad so incredibly large. IMO they are too big.

Most people don't use gestures in the windows ecosystem because neither Windows, nor its OEMs have put any effort into making them useful or supported. Apple did both, and then apps like BetterTouchTool took it even further.

The wrist detection on the mac is okay (orders of magnitude better than my HP), but definitely not perfect. But, it's worse or similar to the one on Lenovo.

The acceleration is okay on the touchpad, but the fact that it carries over to the mouse as well is an abomination.

Fair enough - I will admit to finding plugins for chrome and the like for gesturing, so I can see how that's useful if it's unified across many programs in the Mac ecosystem.

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