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Mice and trackpads

Apple Mac trackpad

7owners with an opinion
40%of verdicts positive
1/2positive/negative since 2024
0happy after 3+ years

Praised for ease of use; criticized for reliability and ergonomics.

What people wrote

Doesn’t like it
> We're 30+ years into trackpads on laptops and they're still terrible on Windows machines. Make it make sense. The old Mac trackpads were great. The new Mac trackpads where they increased the size, and made it solid-state feel terrible to use. Make it make sense.
Likes it
>I still get the feeling there's some lag between my finger movement and the pointer on the screen. This is a big one. Something I found really impressive, even on the first iPhone in 2007, was that it felt like my finger was moving the display itself, rather than performing a gesture to elicit an action. I feel the same way about the macOS trackpad, it feels almost connected to what is on screen. Other systems usually have that gesture/response feeling, which doesn't feel good natural to use.
Doesn’t like it
Yeah, I take it back about the trackpad. It's fine. That stands in contrast to the ones on their computers, which are too big and cause spurious right-clicks and your cursor to jump to other parts of the screen while you're typing. Ridiculous. What makes it worse is that the Pencil doesn't work on the giant computer trackpads. WHY? I would've bought that on day one. Talk about utter failure on Apple's part, year after year.
Likes itDoesn’t say they own it
In the Aqua image the big bright blue scrollbars stand out far, far more than the content. That sucks, honestly. So does the percentage of the screen dedicated to their presence. Also, horizontal scrollbars suck. One thing later version of Finder did well was adjust columns to minimize the presence of them. We just don't need UI that big anymore. These days our cursors are much more accurate, from the magical Mac trackpad to high DPI optical mice, and we're 40+ years into GUIs so the limited number of people who opt-in to a full computing experience can already be expected to know the basics. Yes Tahoe sucks, but going back to Aqua or classic MacOS would also suck, just in a different direction. If you actually spend time using classic MacOS and Aqua these days, man is it frustrating to get basic things done. Everything is so slow and you're constantly resizing windows to see whats in them. I own several Macs from the 80s-00s and they are really in need of many quality of life updates that later MacOS revs added. On a modern Mac, enabling 'show scrollbars' gets you to a pretty optimal Finder experience, minus all the stupid Mac bugs and Tahoe nonsense like this article points out.
Likes itDoesn’t say they own it
Not a gamer - haven't 'gamed' since pitfall - so no experience with mouse vs trackpad in that respect. What seems missing from all this is the notion of gestures. The two finger scroll, single finger pointer move, pinch/zoom, etc - the trackpad is flexible in ways a trackpoint thing just can't be. "I have seen lots of developers at work on their macbooks do the standard select text->copy->paste, and everyone is way slower at this then people who use mouse." Not really sure what you're getting at. Selecting with a... trackpoint can be faster than using a mouse? Maybe, for some people. I'm constantly surprised by mouse-using/GUI people who always do so much more with a mouse than you need to. But I'm not sure that takes away any argument from the mac trackpad.