Why is the touchpad on MacBooks still ahead of other manufacturers?

Correct me if I am wrong. I think all current Windows Laptop are trackpad with physical clicks.

Apple's Trackpad has been using Force Touch ( haptic engine ) since 2015. But I remember correctly my MacBook Air trackpad before Force Touch were excellent too.

It is one of those things where people "thinks" they are doing comparison when they are not. You often see enthusiast and nerds doing so called spec comparison. When in reality they missed out so many things. Better Keyboard, Better Trackpad etc.

The PC / Hardware industry has been operating at negative margin, with their source of profits coming from hardware branding rebate, software preinstalled, Data collection and selling etc. It was only the recent years did Gaming / E-Sports gave them another market to play with. And no one seems to enough incentives or resources to being a much better trackpad. That is why Microsoft had to step in and make their own Surface Line. Without some sort of quality assurance, the market will always be a race to the bottom.

Is not "light years ahead" of __all__ manufacturers, just the cheap ones.

Surface laptop trackpads are on par with Apple ones.

I'd say it's the OS, and the drivers.

I do use a Magic Trackpad 2 with Precision drivers on Windows 10 and ... it's as sluggish as my laptop native touchpad. Gestures barely makes senses, it's lagging everywhere, while the same device on OSX allow smooth-as-butter(tm) interactions.

I also found that OSX drivers have a nicer palm rejection feature where on Windows I frequently click with the palm of my hand.

I had an interesting experience with the very latest Fedora/Gnome versions with the Magic Trackpad letting me guess that an important step towards good gestures support on linux is on the way.

It might change, unless Apple does something new.

Here is a video by LinusTechTips about a new touchpad by Sensel that uses pressure sensors https://youtu.be/XuM2ZG_Hwjk It will be used in the ThinkPad X1 Titanium.

In the same video Linus basically says that capacitive touchpad are nonlinear and hard to get right, and Apple spends a lot of resources in fine tuning, more that anyone else.

I will not call LinusTechTips an authoritative source but to my knowledge, for now, that's the best we have.

Apple designs the hardware, firmware, driver and OS.

For a Windows laptop the touchpad might involve 3 different vendors. And Windows supports older graphical APIs that just don't understand pixel scrolling. OSX doesn't, Apple just deprecated all of that years ago and told everyone to rewrite their app.

I much prefer my ThinkPad's clicky buttons on top of the trackpad to a MacBook's trackpad.

In my opinion the problem is not always the touchpad(hardware) there are a lot of great ones. The problem relies on the driver integration with the os especially the interface. The animation and precision is so smooth in macos that at least makes Me think this hardware is far betteter then others.

It may have to with OS X being optimised for only one type of touchpad, while windows has to accommodate all sorts of touchpads built by other companies.

I imagine the Microsoft surface touchpad would be closer comparison with Mac because Microsoft would have a chance to integrate the hardware with software.

Can someone ELI5 what's so special about the Mac's touchpad? It's been a good couple of years since I've used a MacBook and I don't recall anything in particular standing out for me about their touchpad.

The old thinkpads (sandy, ivy) have great touchpads. Not for gestures or advanced features, but just for moving the cursor predictably, edge scrolling, and discrete buttons on the top and bottom.

The first time I've actually used macOS was on a hackintosh'd Acer laptop, only out of curiosity. I didn't keep it as my main OS but I was surprised to discover the gestures and that they worked perfectly just as I know them today on my Mac. So a lot of the "magic" is in software. Windows Precision might be good at passing the sensor information on to the OS and apps but the implementation simply seems to not be as good. On top of that, at least subjectively, the giant touchpad made out of a glass slab with the haptic feedback just completes the mix, makes it feel right.

My first Mac was a 2015 late MacBook Pro, which is when they introduced the haptic stuff and I tried a friend's Air afterwards and I disliked the feel of the touchpad click in comparison. One of the most surprising little discoveries of moving over to a Mac for me was that despite having bought a Magic Mouse, I never really used it, my brain instinctually just kept gravitating towards the built-in touchpad, which is something I've never had with Windows laptops, in fact I had a seething dislike of the built in pointing devices on such machines all my life because I was way more effective with a mouse.

I've only felt the Mac touchpad slowing down my workflow was Photoshop (but still surprisingly OK), games (this is self-explanatory) and moving around multiple files, selecting and deselecting them. I'm fairly convinced that one of the primary comfort points that made me keep the Mac for the long term was the smooth gesture integration.

I see it as a mix of hardware and software, but mostly software.

Hardware: -Large touchpads, enabled by great palm rejection -Haptic Feedback instead of physical clicks, letting you click anywhere

Software: -start a gesture and the ui begins responding to it. It feels like you’re directly manipulating what’s on the screen. On other OSs they detect the gesture way too late so the feeling is broken. -small details like scroll inertia are really smooth and present all over the OS, refining the overall experience

Not everyone will value a touchpad or touchpad functionality the way you do.

I can give you my use case as anecdata:

The instances I am using a work laptop I am using it at a desk not on my actual lap. I will use the keyboard as much as possible and on the scenario that I am frequently using a mouse input I will make use of a vertical mouse to mitigate RSI.

My casual usage of a touchpad will probably be in the minutes on any given work day. For someone like me an advanced physical touchpad is not a value adding proposition.

Microsoft Precision trackpads get close on the software side, it actually feels like it responds a bit faster. Too bad there's a bug in the driver that makes the cursor jump a few centimeters on every dozen or so clicks (Confirmed on Mi Notebook Air, Dell 5285, XPS 15 7590, 2015 15" Macbook with 3rd party driver), making it essentially unusable.

Some manufacturers (Xiaomi) have glass surfaces that get pretty close to the feeling of Macbook ones.

... but nobody has force touch and that makes all the difference. Ununiform response, no configurability and nothing that gets remotely close to the "low" setting, besides maybe a modded XPS 15 (some tape below the switch).

Macbooks are literally the only devices I've used on which you can comfortably drag things on the touchpad for the above mentioned reasons.

Edit: That's just the basic hardware side, of course. Apple also has fairly well thought out gestures (zoom, back with two fingers to the right) and apps supporting them, including a direct response to the finger and overscroll bounce (except in Electron apps, shame on them).

I use a Mac daily, as well as Surface devices and a Lenovo.

Except for my Surface Book 3, nobody else even comes close to even the four-year-old AAA-powered Magic Trackpad I keep on my desk, although I was surprised at how good the Lenovo Flex 5’s trackpad actually is.

For me, it’s a combination of gesture support (which is why I use a trackpad alongside a mouse), sensitivity (very good hardware) and exquisite fine tuning of things like acceleration and pressure.

(I don’t use the haptic features on my MacBook Pro and prefer tap-to-click to press-to-click, so once a new device is set up, hardware differences become slighter.)

I'm curious, in what way do you consider Macbook touchpad so much better? I have a Macbook pro, a dell, a Thinkpad, and I honestly can't tell which one I like better, they all work perfectly fine.

My 2cents:

1. Tight software/hardware integration (MS have this also).

2. Premium segment positioning in the market, motivating differentiation on quality.

3. Apple brand overall is strongly identified with providing a quality user experience.

4. Other PC makers occupy majority of market which is low-margin, so no motivation to invest in this type of (relatively speaking) niche feature.

I think it's because the laptop OEMs don't build their own laptops, they just pay some Taiwanese ODM to build it. The ODM is more of a manufacturing company than an R&D company and thus does not have the DNA or enough incentive to build a quality trackpad + drivers.

This is a good example of "take my money" features where the value and experience of the feature far outweigh any notions of "open source" or things like that.

There are those that dislike the closed ecosystem of Apple but for me the features and seamless integration of their products far exceeds my desires for that. I would like more easily replaceable parts like batteries and drives but those are once every few years types of things vs. everyday use of a touchpad.

I use a really cheap Acer laptop with a basic windows precision touchpad.

On Linux with GNOME 40... it seems perfectly acceptable. I haven't used Macs too extensively in the past so maybe I'm not used to something wildly better. Synaptics touchpads are still absolutely terrible, but the touchpad on this laptop is quite serviceable for basic multi-touch gestures at least, in my opinion.

Which laptop did you get? I have used an HP elitebook and the touchpad was better than the one in my Macbook pro in some ways.

I keep my trackpad disabled 99% of the time, on my laptop , so....

When you get used to the windows laptop trackpad you probably will no longer care.