Why isn't there a Mac-comparable trackpad?

I am really, really dumbfounded by this and have wondered this for years.

While there have been solid trackpads offered by PCs, there has never, to my knowledge, been a comparable one to a Mac.

 

In what sense? The Samsungs NP700Z5A is large and multitouch capable for instance.

 

Because Apple probably has patents all over the touchpad and part of the mac trackpad performance is due to it's OS X drivers. Ever tried using a macbook pro trackpad in windows, it is the same as any synaptics trackpad in terms of behavior. The mac trackpads have a thin glass coating though which gives them their distinct tactile feel though. I have a feeling Apple would charge insane royalties to prevent other manufacturers from getting the trackpad performance on par with a mac's running on OS X.

 

In what sense would be a good question. Apple has advantages in terms of gestures because of the size of the trackpads they usually use - but things like glass coating, etc are not unique.

While they're superior in terms of gesture recognition, Apple trackpads have also always been inferior as mice. Which explains why a lot of people - people who struggle with a regular trackpad, apparently - are wow'd by it.

As I've said elsewhere, I'm not making gang signs on my trackpads most of the time but mousing - and I'd rather take a superior mousing-experience trackpad for experienced users than something that is designed for someone who finds it really difficult to use a trackpad.

Maybe you'll start seeing more copycat trackpads appear when Windows 8 and possibly the better inbuilt gesture recognition appears. I hope everyone doesn't move en masse to the Crapbook-style pads though even if that's what's preventing more gesture-centric pads appearing on Windows machines, at least not if the tracking also degrades to Apple standards.

 

Mac innovated this kind of gesture-based trackpad, so they have a head start on Synaptics. However, the greater reason that Mac's trackpads are superior is that their behavior is built into the OS, so there's no mucking about trying to get a driver to make the OS do what you want it to do, it's all designed to work together. As tijo said, a Mac running Windows 7 in bootcamp will get much less responsiveness from its trackpad than in OSX - it's a software advantage, not a hardware advantage.

 

well said sir.

Im afraid im with Vogel here, i find apples gestures nice but very inefficient compared to keyboard shortcuts etc. For an actual point and shoot mouser its average to sub par, as until recently you needed a third party app to get decent pointer acceleration so your not moving fingers a huge distance for minor things like closing a window or rt clicking a file.

To top it off anyone needing precise work for photo editing, video editing is using a mouse, a digitizer or both. the touch pad becomes a redundant piece of gear except for loading an app or transferring a few files. in the end i find the focus on the touch pad and gestures silly as its more marketing than actual usability. please dont tell me that using gestures to bring up expose then having to point and shoot a few times quicker than 2 or 3 key presses from home row.

 

No, it's probably an engineered disadvantage as well - or at best, lack of effort. There's e.g. no reason for the Crapbooks to take ~3 times longer than an equivalent Windows machine to boot Windows.

 

of course there is! its so difficult to let intels chipset use intels AHCI support in windows, so lets force it to use IDE mode for your drives ( please note the sarcasm in post ) if the effort was made they could handle both os's equally

 

True - I agree. Any serious user will use a mouse.

It just seems odd how even when Apple integrates the trackpad gestures the OS, Synaptics or ALPS doesn't even come close.

I certainly think there is a slight hardware advantage for the MacBooks - even in Windows, while the touch features don't necessarily work as smoothly the trackpad is still the largest one on the market and still somewhat pleasant to use.

And perhaps with Windows 8 like what was said above, better trackpads will come out that make use of all Windows 8 built-in touch features.

 

I'm fairly certain it's because the gestures are tack-ons.

But as for 'as a mouse' comment, I meant for mousing duties, not as a mouse replacement - i.e. the action of sliding the pointer across the screen. For some reason or another Apple not only can't make actual mice that tracks properly, their tracking profiles on their pads - for whatever reason - *need* a giant trackpad for it to be usable. This is true even with third-party extensions which try to correct these problems.

Looking at people using these, I notice this plays best to people who were already having difficulties using a smaller PC trackpad - either because they don't know how to tune them to their use (the majority of cases) or because they're not coordinated enough to deal with a fast-moving trackpad.

Almost any of the decent varieties of the Synaptics trackpads are much better than the Apples in that particular aspect. And as I said personally, since I spend most of my time mousing on a trackpad, I'd say given the choice of a slowly-tracking pad with great gestures and a rapidly-tracking pad with poor gestures, I'll take the latter.