I'd say my Thinkpad X9's glass haptic touchpad is as good as my Macbook Pro's. Thinkpad X1 Carbon Gen13 has a great optional haptic touchpad at almost no added cost, which makes the years of negligence even more insulting.
"Yeah, we can do it. No, it's not expensive. But we had to choose what to copy-paste from Apple this time around, and a haptic touchpad was $2.93, whereas hating our customers was free!"
My ThinkPad's touchpad has been good enough for 10+ years (and I got a trackpoint!), to the extent I stopped caring altogether. Perhaps a MacBook Pro's is better, but however better it may be, that won't swing me towards Apple. "The best touchpad in the world" is some street creds I'm not interested in.
It's hard to replicate the R&D that went into Apple's trackpads. I don't know this for sure, but I suspect that most laptop companies do not actually engineer their hardware as much as cobble together existing hardware. Even among those that do engineer their hardware, they don't pay as close attention as Apple. (Also they might not engineer on a low enough level in the first place)
There are some haptic trackpads popping up that are okay.
You're saying there's 2% of non-Apple laptops with good trackpads. Apple laptops are below 10% share, so by your own account that 2% is nothing to sneeze at.
Yes, there's a pretty decent number of good trackpads out there. If you really care, you'll find them, same way a few decades ago only people who really cared were buying macs.
I will never buy another laptop with less than a 500 nits display, no matter its specs/price.
I can’t believe virtually every other manufacturer is still making laptops with 250-300 nits.
Spending a full day looking at a dim, washed-out screen is just the worst experience ever. The fact that out of all manufacturers, Apple, which is considered the “expensive” and “premium” brand, made the Neo with 500 nits at that price point is just amazing to me. The rest have no excuse for putting these displays in laptops anymore.
This looks like not too bad a little budget machine. The hardware is just very recent, with Linux kernel support caught up so recently that it hasn't shown up in distros yet. Not a perfect screen or trackpad is to be expected at this price level.
this is another data point in my "year of the linux desktop";
linux is slowly becoming a decent option, not so much
because of linux improving leaps and bounds,
so much as what happens on the windows side collapsing on its own.
10 years ago, I was used to that windows "of course"
would have drivers available for stuff.
I read mirror MacBook Neo and I was expecting something.
2026, So this marks close to 40 years of reading PC reviews, before it was online and in magazines. And they have been the same all these years.
It is all numbers, numbers of port, how fast it runs, SSD / Hard Disk speed. CPU numbers comparison. Screen resolution etc. They are doing exactly the same, reading off spec sheet. And how these spec is better than another spec.
Thanks to Youtuber, or enthusiast who now have wider audience thanks to the internet. Keyboard actually got shouted out, screen details other than resolution matters. Speakers got improved because they keep mentioning it. Trackpad, laptop screen opening. WebCam, cooling. All these small things that no one mention but thanks to those with online influence keep demanding and shouting about it has a lot of these been improved on the PC side. And they all happened in the past 6 to 8 years.
If online publishing thinking why you guys are not getting views and losing perhaps it isn't just the medium alone.
This year also marks 25 years of Apple Store, perhaps worth reminding why Steve wanted to open the store in the first place. For people to experience their products. Something can't be said in words or in advertising. It is best for the customer to feel it.
Just like 98% of non-Apple laptops. Amazing how after all these years nobody could replicate the feel of macbook's trackpads.
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