Guilty of this. I’ve never used a track pad that didn’t feel like complete ass.
I’ve never used a PC one that I liked, but Macs have superb ones. They are so good I now get trackpads for every desktop I work on too (home + work).
They’re great, now if apple could concede that right click is an important thing that’s not going away and not relegate it to a corner barely larger than my finger then they’d be perfect.
EDIT: I forgot the default way to right click on Mac is two finger click, I changed it in the settings when I first got it to be click in the bottom right. If you’ve gotten used to two finger click good on you, but point still stands for us who like the “right” way.
I’m not sure I understand your complaint – if you two-finger tap anywhere on an Apple trackpad made since around 2009, it’s interpreted as a right-click.
Reply to edit: “I forgot that I changed it to make it worse and I’m mad at Apple about it” is maybe the most Lemmy comment I’ve ever read
I am using a Mac touchpad on a laptop right now and no matter where I do the right-click action (extremes of upper-left, upper-right, lower-left, and lower-right, center-of-quadrant again for all of those, true center, etc.) it always takes the click. One-finger clicking is equivalent to “left-click” on Windows while two-finger clicking is equivalent to “right-click”, or alternatively hitting control while one-finger clicking will do the trick. I’ve done this for years and years and it’s always worked for me before…
Seconding this. My company issued me a MacBook and I was really surprised by how well the touchpad worked, and how smoothly gestures work with it. For as much hate as Apple gets, a lot really Just Werks™. Windows and KDE (Wayland) (I haven’t tested other DEs) are certainly improving, but they’re still nowhere near as smooth as what MacOS has had for a pretty long time now.
The crazy thing is that I’ve hackintoshed a ThinkPad T430 and T480, both with full gesture support (but no force touch, though to be fair I don’t use that anyway). In both cases, using their touchpads on MacOS was much better than on Windows or KDE. Though some touchpads aren’t that great to begin with (like, the one on the T430 is pretty small), it’s crazy how much of a difference good software can make to how they feel to use.
“Apple” the company gets hate, b/c they deserve it, but Mac OSX is fantastic - they really put a ton of effort into it, though iOS is a piece of crap - e.g. now they are trying to extort the users to pay money to send files b/t their desktop computer vs. phone, which is just not okay imho. Mac OSX was from an older era, when Steve Jobs was running the company, and people would have legit left Macs (or not switched to it) if it had not been “solid” like it was. Since then, the new era is not to provide “products” but rather “services”.
Oddly enough, with the advent of Windows 7 (so many years ago now), it is fucking Microsoft that has been innovating their software - they are such a terrible company (as too is Apple, and Google, etc.), but they at least were pushing forward, more than Mac OSX, as the Apple corporation switched to put nearly all of their development efforts into iOS, and Music, and TV, and so on.
Apple ofc also has that hardware+software integration thing going on - monopolies really do have their advantages, as well as detractions too. You mentioned hackintoshing a Thinkpad, so I guess you are aware that often people will take a Mac and put Linux onto it as well, it’s wonderful that people have put in the efforts so that we have such possibilities:-).
The issue you described with the touchpad on the hackintosh sounds more like a particular driver issue, which gets deeper than I have any knowledge of so I’ll stop there:-). I will say tangentially that the Mac OSX has a shit-ton of cool features like font antialiasing, the Preview program is amazing, and I could go on and on but what usually gets lost on people is how Mac tended to have had things first, like everything has Bluetooth now, but Mac OSX had it long before Windoze did. I know nothing about Windows 10 or 11 though, except that they push to offer things as a service rather than product, and they show advertisements throughout:-( - those aspects alone turn me away from wanting to use it, even if the rest was somehow a better experience than Mac OSX (which I expect is NOT:-P).
Wow, a nightmare thought just struck me: if Apple enshittifies Mac OSX… the world will become a noticeably worse place, overall:-(. Fortunately someone will have it backed up and we can hack it (even if having to use older hardware), and there’s always Linux that while significantly behind - especially in drivers & UI/UX concerns - is better than it has ever been.
Yep exactly, a Magic Trackpad is my main input device. It’s great for design work where you often interact with canvases and might need to scroll in every direction. It’s also more comfortable to use for long time periods.
Look at a Charybdis from bastardkb. Got a trackball built into the keyboard.
Lol the price of these fad keyboards are comical… 180€ with no switches and no keycaps?
Seriously, they ALL fucking suck. I honestly kinda miss the old nub thingie that IBM (now Lenovo) had (has?). It took some getting used to but it was so much better than a touch pad.
They still have them, along with some Dell and HP laptops too I think. Honestly I like both. My laptop has that and I find myself switching between them mindlessly. Touch pad is great because of gestures. But the nub is more comfortable imo.
They still have them
The little red dot is in the ThinkPad logo, at that point they are acknowledging its central to their brand.
The keyboards are garbage too. Can’t stand typing on laptop keyboards and every one I’ve tried (mostly Dells at work) has been shit for the last 15 years. I bought a $10 bluetooth keyboard for my tablet that’s a better experience and smaller than a laptop for fucks sake.
They got a lot worse after 2010 when “thin” happened. I’ve got an NEC laptop from 1998 that has an excellent keyboard.
Yea I have an old Toshiba Satellite laying around that has an awesome keyboard. It’s too old to really do anything with but I love the design of it. The annoying thing is that Bluetooth keyboard I mentioned is compact as most laptops yet it still manages to have a good tactile feedback when you type on it and it was cheap so we know it can be done. Most laptops just feel “squishy” and start missing keystrokes if you type too fast. The worst I’ve encountered was one of the ones Microsoft offered for the Surface that was just a solid rubber thing. The keys didn’t actually press at all. I can’t understand what they were thinking with that. They had another option with actual keys but it wasn’t very good either even by laptop standards.
I have. The Steam Controller (and Steam Deck) trackpads are very nice, mostly because there are two of them and they are thumb operated. The haptic feedback is really nice as well.
Aside from my linux macbook, the steam deck trackpad is one of the best trackpads I’ve ever used. The “taptic engine” (don’t know the generic term) simulated clicks and feedback on the deck’s trackpad feel so much more refined compared to the standard tactile button used in the original steam controller. Being able to adjust the click pressure level too is a nice bonus.
I just wish the Deck trackpad was better at ignoring finer movements closer to the click threshold, like a standard trackpad - likely something that could be added with a future update I guess?
I can only use it as a laptop 1% of the time and it still makes perfect sense because otherwise I would have to own a separate device for this 1% of the time.
That makes sense. Though I think it depends on what you’re doing for that 1%. For me personally I prefer a beefy desktop for work+games, and a low-power laptop/tablet for portable jobs.
That way I can upgrade the PC tower every couple years and keep using the same portable device for years and years, since it’s basically just an email/web/SSH terminal. I’ve been using the same desktop PC since 2009, just upgrading it as needed. Over 15 years it feels like fewer devices than having to keep replacing a high end laptop every 3-4 years or so.
you’re telling me there are people who DON’T have a high-refresh monitor, mechanical keyboard, and wired 13-button mouse on them at all times?
](https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/c7f3f18b-c775-419c-ac9d-f0beb9f6f4e0.jpeg){kind=link}
Does a laptop with a built-in high refresh rate display and mechanical keyboard count…?
I personally carry my MX Master. Not as many buttons, but the adaptive free-scrolling and the side-scrollling wheel make it a productivity lifesaver.
I mean, you still can use it on the go if you need to.
how about…
…some wheels