All this back and forth about the T2 chip and security - I’m pretty sure the devs just didn’t feel like writing drivers for older versions of the touchpad, jeez. 3rd party developers have had no problem supporting the older trackpads with their windows precision touchpad drivers. Apple just didn’t do it for whatever reason, there is no technical limitation. Sure, the T2 may handle input in some way - that doesn’t mean they couldn’t write drivers for non-T2 versions as well, but they didn’t.
I don’t think it’s planned obsolescence, I think they just drew the line there for the amount of dev time they wanted to put into it.
Agreed.
Just adding my two cents here, the Apple T2 chip is surely handling the built-in trackpad, if you have a T2 equipped Mac, head to > About This Mac > System Report... > Hardware > USB to see for yourself. It's not just a security chip to encrypt/decrypt storage and enable secure boot, it's also an overlord of all built-in I/O that connected to the USB bus, e.g. keyboard, trackpad,
beloved Touch Bar and FaceTime camera.
However, that dosen't mean Intel Macs without the T2 chip couldn't have Microsoft Precision Touchpad drivers, when they're running Windows using Boot Camp, there's no actual hardware difference between them and other Windows laptops, which mostly have Precision Touchpad drivers at this point.
Apple have been ignoring Boot Camp users for a long time, to me it seems like there's only one developer (or a tiny team at best) inside Apple is responsible for writing, testing and distributing Boot Camp drivers – not even full-time, otherwise we should have gotten regular GPU driver updates rather than only one update per year.
So it is what it is. Maybe with the fully control of the T2 chip it's easier for this one-man team inside Apple to implement Precision Touchpad drivers for Boot Camp users, or maybe they somehow acknowledged third party Precision Touchpad drivers having issues on T2 equipped Macs so they decided to release an official one.
With more in-house silicons to be introduced down the road, I don't see why would Apple come back and add more Boot Camp drivers support for Intel Macs other than annual graphics drivers. If anyone needs Boot Camp for whatever reason, it's really the time to consider buying a second Windows machine.