Originally posted on April 19, 2010 @ 8:33 am
As much as I love lugging around a laptop everywhere so I can log on the net and work in the nearest coffee shop or anywhere else with wifi or 3G coverage. But there’s really one thing about laptops I don’t care for: the trackpad. I seriously don’t understand how trackpads can still suck at this point, when touchscreens, especially on the iPhone and iPad are really amazing.
Devin of CrunchGear has an interesting editorial on this issue:
It seems obvious. The trackpad is, after the keyboard, the object you interact with the most on any laptop. Wouldn’t laptop makers want this object to be largest, most responsive, most versatile thing they can make it? Yet on every PC laptop I review or test out, the trackpad is small, poorly placed, unresponsive, or all three. And the buttons, which should easy and satisfying to click, are often stubborn, squishy, or small. What the hell are they thinking?
Sure, with a little netbook you can’t expect it. But the question is not a netbook question (though to be fair, the reviews linked above are in the low-mid range). This is on otherwise-excellent laptops costing $1000-$2000 that we are finding tiny, low-quality trackpads. There are exceptions here and there, but a huge majority of the laptops out there are, in my opinion, shorting the buyer. When someone is buying a laptop that they are going to use as a primary computer, the savvy laptop-maker would do well to assure the consumer that the laptop is of the highest quality, and not cobbled together from whatever parts fit the bill. The trackpad is the first thing that most consumers will touch, and if they fall in love with one, their budget suddenly expands to allow that love to be requited.
So I’ve been using a little program called Scrybe that actually gives you a bit of two- and three-finger gestures for your trackpad. It gives me a bit of what it feels like to be on a Macbook thanks to the gestures, but the actual trackpad experience still is sucky. Yep, laptop manufacturers, please, think of the trackpads.