No surprises here. Just like the lockdown on iPhone screen and part replacements, Macbooks suffer from the same Apple’s anti-repair and anti-consumer bullshit. Battery glued, ssd soldered in and can’t even swap parts with other official parts. 6000$ laptop and you don’t even own it.
The sad fact is that they get away with it because they have the best laptops out there in terms of build quality and user comfort (try using a Macbook touchpad and then any other one after it).
They also have the best software integration because they have to support a limited number of hardware configurations
^ This.
Have been given a current Surface Pro laptop for work and must use an external mouse, or rage in frustration that my 13 yo MBP has a better functioning trackpad.
I have a Dell laptop from 8ish years ago whose touchpad behaves pretty much identically to an Apple touchpad.
Software support for touchpad gestures on Linux is pretty lacking, but that’s not the hardware’s fault.
Interesting, because my last Dell was a Latitude from 2018 and the touchpad on that was utter crap compared to any Macbook with the newer Force Touch (as opposed to the older pre-2015 (or pre-2018 on Air)) touchpads.
I hadn’t heard of Force Touch, so I looked it up on Wikipedia. Isn’t that difficult to control? It sounds annoying more than anything else.
Significantly better than the old hinged ones because the feedback from clicking it is completely even across the entire thing. Can’t go back once you try, IMO.
I’ve used both hinged and non-hinged Apple touchpads, and the difference is noticeable but minor to me. Certainly not enough to make up for everything that’s wrong with Apple hardware.
I just don’t like carrying a mouse with me if I want to use my laptop as a laptop. To me the difference is pretty big.