Microsoft should release their own multi-touch touchpad with this tech and call it the Surface Touchpad or something along those lines. Basically their equivalent of the Apple Magic Trackpad. It's what I miss when I've got my Surface Book docked, having come from a MBP/Magic Trackpad setup.
Indeed they should! I'd like to have a good pointer that I can glue to my keyboard and use leaned back.
I'd also like to configure what the gestures mean; there's no way to make three finger tap act like middle click. I use a Surface Pro 4. Microsoft has been very heavy handed about insisting you gesture only the way they want you to gesture. I really don't need a gesture to launch an already-disabled Cortana.
One of the biggest reasons I stopped using PCs, and started using Macs, was the quality of Apple's touchpads. I recently had to work with a new Dell, and was sad to see that things hadn't improved much during the last 10 years. Seriously, what manufacturer could possibly compare a Mac to their PC offering and find that crap acceptable? I hope this push by Microsoft will result in a more Mac-like touchpad experience for PC users.
Even Microsoft's own flagship Surface Book has a touch pad which is abysmal compared to what MBP offered on it's debut. I constantly experience issues ranging from jerky movements to completely failing to scroll until rebooted on my Surface Book. It's mind blowing that this still happens in 2016.
Actually I agree with him. The touchpads on the xps and MacBook are similar in optimal conditions, but the XPS one seems way more sensitive to sweat/oils from the hand and then stops working until it is cleaned. I have hyperhydrosis so my hands sweat alot, never caused an issue on my MacBook, but the XPS doesn't handle it as well.
On the software side, the MacBook can also handle finger movements quickly followed by a tap much better, while on the XPS if you do really quick movements followed by a tap the cursor will jump back a little. (Annoyingly enough to accidentally hit the close tab button when trying to switch tabs). I reported this to dell and they said the issue lies in the MS driver.
What is a Precision Touchpad? Is it some sort of Microsoft designed touchpad? Is it a certain bar the laptop manufacturers have to meet in order to call their touchpads "Precision"?
>Precision Touchpad made its debut with Windows 8. Co-developed between Microsoft and touchpad company Synaptics, the spec changed how Windows works with touchpads. Traditionally, touchpads masqueraded to Windows as essentially USB- or PS/2-connected mice—simple two-dimension, single-input devices. Features such as multitouch and gestures were handled by a combination of the touchpad firmware and proprietary drivers. This meant that Windows itself had no ability to add new gestures or refine the finger-detection algorithms; it was all an opaque feature of the third-party drivers.
>With Precision Touchpad, the raw touchpad input is exposed to Windows itself, allowing the operating system to choose how it handles the complex multi-finger inputs. The gestures, the disambiguation of taps and swipes—these are all now performed by Windows, not a third-party driver.
This seems like a great move to me. I started using a 2016 Razer Stealth, and the worst thing about it is the Synaptics Touch crapware they include to configure the touch pad.
My wife has a brand-new Lenovo ThinkPad with Windows 10, and the touchpad is a total disaster. Now, this shouldn't be interpreted as PC haterade: until fairly recently I was a big ThinkPad guy (but with Linux), and switched to MacBook Pro only after they went Intel. But these touchpads on the new ThinkPads are cheap and tacky. I can't imagine having to use one every day.
So any effort PC/Win laptop makers are taking to improve things is welcome. I doubt they'll ever be as good as the touchpads on Apple hardware, though.
FWIW - On the last Thinkpad I bought (the X220) the touchpad was notably worse under than Windows with the official vendor drivers compared with Linux using whatever came out of the box. Two finger scrolling comes to mind - on Linux it worked smoothly, but with Windows, there was a considerable lag between me scrolling on the touchpad, and scrolling actually happening in the application.
I've noticed the same thing with my T530. The Windows drivers for the Thinkpad also don't let you set the middle trackpoint button to middle-click. There was a way to get it to work by editing the registry, but that's stopped working in recent versions too. I don't understand why Lenovo keeps putting out user-hostile driver updates for Windows. I don't see how it benefits Lenovo, so I guess it's just total incompetence.
And yeah, just like you, I find the default behavior under both Fedora and Ubuntu to be perfect.
I'm surprised she went with Lenovo, and unsurprised with the results, given their history of anticonsumer practices. They've been caught putting malware on their laptops a few times recently[0]. The ThinkPads made by Lenovo should never be compared with the ones made by IBM - that era is over.
In platform-specific matters like this (text rendering, input handling, &c.), Microsoft has always led the way in IE or now Edge, Mozilla following after a while (admittedly often years) in Firefox, and Chrome typically years later. Firefox and Edge handle precision touch very well; Chrome… well, it’s OK these days. But definitely not great.
I’m still waiting for Firefox or Chrome to actually implement the Pointer Events API properly. Edge does exactly what I expect, Firefox does almost everything as I expect, Chrome is simply terrible. And only Edge supports pressure sensitivity, so the Surface Pen only has full utility on Edge.
I haven't tried the Surface Book, but you're lucky if you can even fit three or more fingers on the trackpads on the Surface Pro. Maybe MS could show some leadership there as well.
I use a Surface Pro 3 for work, with students currently being given the 4.
I don't remember noticing much difference between the covers on the 3 and 4, and I find the trackpad on the 3 is bordering on unusable for anything that requires a large range of movement.
I really like the Surface as a hardware product, but the type covers are just gross.
Well I'm pretty happy with this kind of things, I recently bought an MSI GT72S and the trackpad is a 5/10 for a whopping $2400 notebook, never had one before but used a Macbook for about 2 months and it was beautiful, in that time I never felt the need of a mouse.
I am surprised to see the Latitude 14 in the list of laptops with precision touchpads. Fingerprint readers and touchpad aren't a strength of the latitude laptops I owned so far.
I was interested too with the Latitudes. The article is vague, but it does mention latest models.
I just picked up an e7440 - new but a few generations old - from the Dell business outlet. The touchpad (along with the battery) is the biggest weak point of the laptop. It works somewhat okay with Win 10, but it is awful on Linux using recent kernels on Fedora 25.
But I tend to use a MBP at work, and the touchpad on it is just so much better. I don't even bother with a mouse with the Mac as OSX really integrates the trackpad well. I am much happier with a decent wireless mouse with the Latitude.
