Microsoft to Require Precision Touchpads in Future Windows 10 Laptops

https://www.slashgear.com/microsoft-is-about-to-fix-windows-laptops-biggest-frustration-26468799/

by dvdhnt • 10 years ago

79 52 10 years ago

jacquesc2• 10 years ago

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.

therein• 10 years ago

How is the trackpad otherwise, though?

devopsproject• 10 years ago

terrible?

jacquesc2• 10 years ago

Trackpad is excellent. My only gripe would be the configuration software / drivers they include.

zarify2• 10 years ago

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.

Arainach• 10 years ago

Are you looking at the original 2012 Surface Pro? The SP4 has a trackpad roughly as large as the Macbook Pro, as does the Surface Book.

ClassyJacket• 10 years ago

I don't believe that's correct. Look at a Surface Pro trackpad next to a MacBook Pro trackpad.

http://i.imgur.com/rynFtJQ.jpg

The MacBook Pro Trackpad is 206% of the size of the Surface Pro 4 trackpad. Literally double the size.

waiseristy• 10 years ago

The SP4 touchpad pales in comparison to the MBP. Multitouch support is bush league, and the touchpad is hinged so you can only click on ~75% of it.

adventist2• 10 years ago

Yeah I can fit all five of my fingers on the SP4.

zarify2• 10 years ago

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.

symlinkk• 10 years ago

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"?

gruez• 10 years ago

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.

http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/10/pc-oems-ditch-the-cus...

lewisl9029• 10 years ago

Wow. I hope this means we can finally have a separate set of sensitivity & acceleration settings for touchpads vs mice.

cm2187• 10 years ago

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.

hiram112• 10 years ago

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.

magaman69• 10 years ago

precision touchpads are useless if the software doesnt support it. the trackpad in the surface pro is not very smooth when scrolling in chrome.

bryanrasmussen• 10 years ago

sure, but generally if capabilities exist in the hardware applications will arise to take advantage of those capabilities.

chrismorgan• 10 years ago

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.

lathiat• 10 years ago

chrome does its own crazy smooth scrolling stuff, it has also been changing a lot in the last few release. YMMV.

tinus_hn• 10 years ago

But there won't be support if they are just one of many different types of hardware people have. That is probably why Microsoft is mandating them.

anjc• 10 years ago

This is obviously a Chrome issue seeing as scrolling is super smooth in everything else

innocentoldguy• 10 years ago

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.

Sephr• 10 years ago

How "new" are we talking here? Dell's XPS line has had precision touchpads since the beginning of 2015.

bicubic• 10 years ago

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.

radicalbyte• 10 years ago

The 2016 XPS touchpad is horrible.

adventist2• 10 years ago

Surface Pro 4 Touchpad is awesome for me!

rbanffy4• 10 years ago

The hardware means very little when the software support isn't there. I use track pads on all my Macs because of the wonderful gesture support.

wluu3• 10 years ago

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.

BillinghamJ2• 10 years ago

The trackpads built into the Surface computers are still nowhere near the level of Apple's.

Klathmon• 10 years ago

I disagree, having used both the Surface trackpads are honestly my favorite.

The only thing I wish they had was more customizable software

basch• 10 years ago

the Pro and Book have completely different trackpads.

zbrozek• 10 years ago

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.

wluu3• 10 years ago

You can set three finger tap to do "nothing" instead of Cortana. You just need to goto the touchpad settings screen.

See https://www.thurrott.com/mobile/microsoft-surface/7232/surfa...

Wish there were other things I could set it to though.

rbanffy4• 10 years ago

Any word on Linux support for this kind of hardware?

abrowne2• 10 years ago

They're already out there, such as in the Dell XPS 13. IIRC some of the features work better with libinput.

rbanffy4• 10 years ago

I wonder if I can use gestures like I do on macOS for things like switching desktops.

wyclif• 10 years ago

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.

philipov• 10 years ago

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.

[0] http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/now-three-pre-installed-malware...

ch_123• 10 years ago

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.

wildmusings• 10 years ago

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.

AbraKdabra• 10 years ago

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.

Microsoft to Require Precision Touchpads in Future Windows 10 Laptops

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