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Ask HN: Bad touchpads – hardware or software?

2 points| supermatou | 8 years ago | reply

Why are typical laptop touchpads so lousy, compared to those in Macbooks? Is it the cheap (i.e. less capable) hardware? That wouldn't make sense to me: when you pay hundreds of dollars for a laptop, you'd be happy to pay a few (dozen?) dollars more for a quality touchpad and the manufacturers should know that.

Or is it the software - as in patents that prevent the manufacturers from offering the same smooth gestures with their drivers/software?

Anyone have an authoritative explanation?

2 comments

[+] tqh|8 years ago|reply

It's mostly about bandwidth depending on how the device is connected inside the computer (usb is much better than ps/2 or serial), polling frequency, and software filtering raw data properly (duplicates and such). Some improvements https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/c774326a219536ab615...

[+] PaulHoule|8 years ago|reply

I'd rather save the dozen dollars and spend it on a mouse.