Ask HN: Why do no Windows laptops have a trackpad as nice as the MBP?

Mostly because of vertical integration, and Apple being more vertically integrated in comparison to other PC manufacturers.

Simply put, when you design and build every single thing that goes into a complex product, you then have complete control over everything that makes up that product, and thus have complete control over that resulting product's quality. A more vertically integrated company is thus in a better position to make a better quality product - particularly so, because it has a better potential to address any quality issues stemming from where separate components interface.

Think about it, if you build an assembled product using parts sourced from third parties (ie you're not vertically integrated), you are somewhat at the mercy of third parties and the quality of their parts. On one end, this can be beneficial (or bad), as you can reap quality gains anytime you're vendors improve the quality of their parts (and vice versa).

But, generally speaking, vendors are only interested in the quality of their part/product, not necessarily your downstream product which sources their part/product as a component. As so, new quality problems can arise from integrating separate parts, of which your vendors may not care much to address, but you at times can't address them either (in the best possible way) because it would take slight changes to each of the vendor's products, at which you're at the mercy of your vendors to change but it's not really in their interest to do so. As so, from a holistic viewpoint (your assembled product), you can end up being stuck with a suboptimal solution (ie lower quality product).

Because there is no PC maker that cares about quality. Everything is about price and "value", which generally means price for specs, regardless of how well one can utilize those specs or how well things work.

This. PC vendors generally assemble parts made by other people. By and large, their trackpads can only as good as the best one available from third party vendors. Since PC vendors just assemble parts, it creates a race to the bottom scenario because that's the only way they can really differentiate an amalgamation of commodity parts. Also, PC's are usually sold on spec and it's difficult to quantify how good a trackpad works.

Since Apple designs their own stuff, they aren't reliant on other people to make a good trackpad, and they charge a premium for it.

The short answer is boring and won't win any PC vs Mac arguements online - it's about economies of scale. Nobody wants to design, manufacture and mass-produce a line of haptic trackpads unless they have an enormous lineup of machines that can use them. To Apple, the interests aligned and the investment paid off. Other manufacturers have tried the haptic trackpad route, but nobody has the tenure in that field that Apple does.

Despite that, I still share your sentiment. MacOS isn't a suitable environment for a lot of development work, and Apple makes no attempts to acknowledge of fix these gaps. Depending on your workload, maybe an Asahi Mac would work well? If you're just interested in a gesture-based workflow, KDE's Wayland session ships default with Asahi and is a great experience for gesture-lovers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aBEsxTVRsEo&t=134s

My experience using KDE with a Magic Trackpad 2 has been excellent. I get the smooth scrolling and responsive gesture support I missed from MacOS, with constantly improving support in apps like Firefox, which recently got a great 1:1 pinch-to-zoom and two-finger-swipe back gesture. My only complaints come down to the price, fragility of the thing, and the Lovecraftian horror they list as a "Lightning port".

It's really surprising and also a real shame. I have played around with my friend's Windows Surface laptop and it was quite good, but that has been the only PC laptop I have seen come close.

I actually have Asahi installed as a second OS on my MBP and considered going with Asahi and something like an ROG Ally for work/play... but of course Asahi isn't cleared for work use by our security team.

With that in mind, I tried it anyway and had a lot of issues with dependencies missing arm64 binaries which unfortunately makes it difficult (if not impossible) to compile the giant projects with stale dependencies we have at the place I work.

Surface machines feel nice and do their due x86 diligence, but they're just as ugly as a Macbook when something goes wrong. My Surface Pro 3 was a great machine, sadly plagued with a dearth of issues that could only be solved by replacing it. I like feeling like a premium user with milled aluminum and all that, but the fragility of those machines just make me too paranoid to carry them around. They make poor work laptops in my opinion, but I guess it's all very subjective and depends on the sort of "work" you do.

My best compromise recommendation is to swallow the cost and get a Magic Trackpad. They work great on Linux, and the only "broken" feature is Force Touch. If you're using GNOME or KDE in a Wayland session, it will zip around and make you happier than a kid in Compiz.

> With that in mind, I tried it anyway and had a lot of issues with dependencies missing arm64 binaries

You don't know the half of it. I worked on internal tooling at a mostly-Mac studio during the Apple Silicon transition... it was awful. Our entire engineering team bought "upgrades" before we knew if our product even built on M1, and wouldn't you know it, huge portions of our build system was unusable. So then they all switched to cloud-only builds, and then eventually to builds in an accelerated Linux VM, and then to a mostly ARM-native pipeline with Rosetta shims for the less cooperative software.

Mind you, we didn't actually ship to Mac. We wasted hundreds of engineering hours a month just because we wanted to develop on them locally, and by the time I left that dream wasn't even a reality yet. YMMV, but for enormous and fragile business frameworks that's not an uncommon story or anything.

>My best compromise recommendation is to swallow the cost and get a Magic Trackpad.

I don't get it: this appears to be an external device. The whole point of a trackpad is that it's built into your laptop. If I'm going to carry an external device around and plug it in every time I use my laptop on-the-go, I'll just get a mouse.

Haha, there has to be a modding community dedicated to embedding this into a laptop shell google's furiously

I'm surprised no one's tried modding touchpads (such as MacBook ones) to fit different laptops, but I think it would be nearly impossible to do well, because the dimensions of the touchpads are going to be different, so making the transplant fit would require manufacturing a new top cover (the part that surrounds the keyboard) for the target laptop, which would be pretty much impossible for someone without access to a plastics factory, or who can finance a large enough order to do the engineering and tooling set-up for that with a contract manufacturer. But I wonder if anyone's tried to do it at all, even if the results are a bit ugly.

Maybe I'm crazy, but I just place mine to the right side of my laptop and use it like normal. It feels natural and is what I'm used to at my desk, and lets me sorta position my display wherever feels right while I work.

It's not ideal, I guess, but the trackpad barely takes up space in my daily carry and is always charged at my desk. If I'm headed out for a longer productivity session, sometimes I'll toss it in my bag just to work a little more comfortably.

I've never actually seen one of these external trackpads, but are they thin enough to just put inside your laptop before you close the lid?

If not, that's the part I don't understand: if I have to carry around, and plug in, some external pointing device, I'd just bring a small mouse. But if a trackpad can fit inside the laptop, that would take less space than the mouse, and be easier to keep track of inside a backpack.

I've repeatedly heard about how great apple trackpads are over the years, and felt confused because I've never found the trackpads on non mac computers to be worse than macs. My theory is that profligate mac users try another computer, notice the trackpad is different from what they're used to, and decide that this difference amounts to being worse. Since nobody tunes their trackpads exactly like apple does, they are doomed to deciding that there is no trackpad as good as apple's.

I am not an Apple fan by any stretch and am leaning into the PC laptop world because I both want and need a better development environment and more versatile computing environment. I have owned both MacBooks and PC laptops and the former has generally felt more pleasant to use.

The trackpad on the Microsoft Surface range is actually quite good and close enough that I wouldn't complain.

On the other hand, the trackpad on my Dell is fatiguing to use. It requires excessive force to actuate a click, right clicking is clumsy. Also, due to its lower sensitivity and accuracy, it's more frustrating to use, feeling more like I am dragging the cursor around.

On my MBP I prefer the trackpad to an external mouse, spending literally entire work days using nothing other than the trackpad without feeling any impediment when compared to an external mouse. On my Dell, I prefer an external mouse to the trackpad and cannot imagine doing a full day's work with the trackpad alone.

Many Apple product niceties can be explained by the simple fact that Apple gets to control the hardware and the software of their products.

Simply said, Apple can write their OS, Userland, and drivers to play very nicely with the hardware that they select.

Even then they have issues sometimes, see the ridiculous thermal throttling you can experience on later Intel MacBooks.

I am not an Apple fan at all, and after using a lot of previous generation Intel Macbook Pros at work, I found no significant gains in terms of usability over Windows laptops at all. In fact, I hated the way those Intel macs were always constantly heating up and making noise; the touchpad and keyboard were great but the heat and noise were deal-killers for me all the way. One maxed-out Macbook Pro even died from the constant overheating and CPU fan cycling.

I would say Apple Silicon was the only game changer in the Macbook line, without which I wouldn't have bought one for myself at all. It provides such a pleasant experience in terms of eliminating heat/noise along with offering ridiculous battery life.

Imo the trackpad on the Surface Book 2 is better than the trackpad on my 2023 Macbook Pro. The MacBook has a more noticeable delay before starting scrolling and sometimes misinterprets two finger clicks as one finger clicks.

I think the important things to look for are a glass trackpad running Windows Precision Trackpad Drivers.

I have felt many "significantly worse" on very, crappy systems. I feel there is a vast number which are similarly "premium" or very close, I can't tell the difference.

Are we sure that there is significant differences or is this just the Apple Halo effect in action ?

It seems like a big leap to go from "this other laptop trackpad isn't great" to "none MacBook trackpads all suck"

You tried one other and it wasn't good. This doesn't say anything about other trackpads.

It's not a big leap if you have actually tried both the Mac trackpad and a variety of other PC OEM trackpads. It's night and day really.

Yeah, no. Tried several - Dell, Lenovo, Asus, Surface - never found a Windows trackpad that was anything remotely as precise and usable as a MacBook. Strangely, I thought the Pixelbook's was excellent, the only trackpad that compared.

It’s well known that Mac trackpads are a mile beyond everyone else’s (Microsoft’s Surface trackpads, for me, come closest, but still not close).

That’s not really in dispute.. the question is: why?

Yeah it does sound that way. I have been jumping between PC laptops and MacBooks for years and this has been a consistent experience for me between the manufacturers - with the exception of the Surface range of laptops, which I believe have great trackpads

Apple has little to no competition so they price their devices high and use high quality parts to justify it.

Windows laptops have much competition and is difficult to break even. So they use what ever works and give great value.

I love the trackpad and keyboard on my Asus G14.

Its also fast as stink... They even sell a variant with a mobile 4090 (which is an underclocked desktop 4080) now.

That mobile 4090... it scares me.

Blender benchmarks claim it gets more than 2x the performance of the max-spec desktop M2 Ultra. That's an Nvidia 120w GPU versus a 300w Apple SOC.

Well its Achilles Heel is the 16GB pool... Not so much for gaming or basic Blender, but for running/training AI.

The Pheonix APU probably has respectable, base M2 like throughput though.

Microsoft Surface laptops are pretty close to MBPs.