Has anyone ever seen someone, be them a Mac or Windows/Linux user, ever say bad things about Apple's Magic Trackpad? Everyone I know who has experience with Apple's trackpad say it's the best trackpad on the entire market regardless of manufacturer. I have to agree that it definitely blows every other PC trackpad out of the water in terms of cursor smoothness/responsiveness, the way it scrolls so naturally, the inertia, what you can do with it (gestures), and now Force Touch. I am curious to see any negative things that people have to say about it when compared to other trackpads. Not interested in reviews comparing it to a mouse though. Trackpad and mouse are two entirely separate methods of input.
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Magic Trackpad and negative reviews
- Thread starter chromite
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Sure, Apple trackpads in the various MacBooks are superior to Windows notebooks' trackpads. However the Magic Trackpad is a different device that, because of it's placement isn't used quite the same as on a notebook. I got one with my retina iMac a year ago and found that it was essentially too small to get sufficient resolution and range for that big screen (made even "worse" by having a second display). I'm now using it on a Mac mini system.
You said don't compare to a mouse, but it has a big win in that the original Magic Trackpad is only twice the size of a mouse and much smaller than a mouse pad, so it takes up much less desk area, which is important with my Mac mini installation.
While the Magic Trackpad 2 might solve the size/resolution problem it's insanely more expensive. It also won't work on older systems (like this mini) and has become a throw-away device when the battery eventually fails. I have no intention to buy one.
You said don't compare to a mouse, but it has a big win in that the original Magic Trackpad is only twice the size of a mouse and much smaller than a mouse pad, so it takes up much less desk area, which is important with my Mac mini installation.
While the Magic Trackpad 2 might solve the size/resolution problem it's insanely more expensive. It also won't work on older systems (like this mini) and has become a throw-away device when the battery eventually fails. I have no intention to buy one.
Just reading that elsewhere. I wonder why they insist on BT 4 in the specs? El Cap is to be expected (to get the Force Touch support).
Why does it matter? No one solution is ever a best fit for all people. Apple's trackpads are great in OSX but they're entirely different under Windows.
To force upgrade more likely. They could've backported trackpad driver, as one would expect from responsible HW/SW vendor (newsflash – professional users will not be upgrading for months to come). At least basic functions, shouldn't be that hard to do.
I'm on Yosemite, 10.11 upgrade turned to be a disaster, rolled back. Got MT2 (and they don't state 10.11 requirements as they should – in HUGE RED LETTERS) – and all I can do is move the cursor and left-click.
Requiring beta software for peripheral to work, what's wrong with Apple these days.
That's the cool part, this is only the x.0 release, imagine how smooth and fast El Capitan is going to be after about 10.11.4 or so.
As they say, YMMV. I've got El Capitan running on all our Macs but the server. By the time of general release all issues had been worked out for everything we use, but needed to disable rootless to get XQuartz to completely install. Note we don't use Outlook or the latest Microsoft Office. So far it's been the smoothest upgrade ever, and we started with Jaguar.
I wish it would be that simple on my case.
I develop Java daemons which do heavy network I/O (both TCP and UDP). In Yosemite daemon runs for weeks without issues, in El Capitan with its "improved" network stack OS runs out of sockets/descriptors in several hours, making the computer unusable.
Same JVM, same everything – different OS versions. El Capitan is broken (even in 10.11.1 beta).
To make things more gloomy, I don't think this is something Apple is going to fix any time soon. Desktop users will not be affected (they will see this issue with OS uptime of several years), and it's not a critical item like missing emoji.
There seems to be quite a lot of low-level issues with this release – people report memory leaks, I see socket leaks... Extremely bad engineering.