Ask HN: Why do no Windows laptops have a trackpad as nice as the MBP?
When plugged into a dock and used as a desktop workstation, it's as good as any Linux desktop and superior to my MBP for programming.
Though I really appreciated the performance, noise and battery life of the MBP and have been using a Mac professionally for 6 years - it ultimately no longer matches my requirements.
Additionally, I couldn't use it for both work and play, forcing me to carry a second gaming laptop when I travelled. I guess support for Windows or Linux with full HW acceleration would solve this, but that's not due for several years if ever.
That said, I regularly work from libraries and cafes so the feel of the laptop is important.
The Dell, despite being a premium laptop has a trackpad that is exhausting to use. It's inaccurate, insensitive, and the mechanical clicks feel terrible (both on Windows and Linux).
The keyboard is fine, the screen is great, though the speakers are really poor.
Are there any PC notebooks that rival the feel of the MBP?
Why are manufacturers seemingly incapable of making a laptop that is as nice to use as a MBP?
Surely their QA teams have used MacBooks and a company the size of Dell could just make it happen if they wanted?
Do Apple patents simply prevent anyone else from being able to make a haptic trackpad?
27 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 75.9 ms ] threadSince Apple designs their own stuff, they aren't reliant on other people to make a good trackpad, and they charge a premium for it.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Its also fast as stink... They even sell a variant with a mobile 4090 (which is an underclocked desktop 4080) now.
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.
The Pheonix APU probably has respectable, base M2 like throughput though.
I think the important things to look for are a glass trackpad running Windows Precision Trackpad Drivers.
Are we sure that there is significant differences or is this just the Apple Halo effect in action ?
You tried one other and it wasn't good. This doesn't say anything about other trackpads.
That’s not really in dispute.. the question is: why?
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 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.
Windows laptops have much competition and is difficult to break even. So they use what ever works and give great value.
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.
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).