As an tech professional and coder I can still say that barely 5% of my work is constrained by CPU. I'd trade all their hardware improvements for physical left and right click buttons instead of those awful trackpad gestures.
Honestly, a mediocre trackpad is a small price to pay for an ethically sourced system. Considering I do 90% of my work with a mouse, I've never really missed using MacOS. The touch-based metaphors only hurt mouse users anyways.
I would cry tears of joy to get a laptop with mouse buttons. Trackpad gestures are a gimmick and so much harder to user than buttons. Apple did it to be "bold" and everyone copied them.
Gestures are one thing, but I've got a laptop now that has "virtual buttons" on a trackpad (the trackpad even physically clicks down) and it's excessively annoying to use. I can't feel which "button" I'm pressing, so mistakes are made. I'd rather have a trackpoint + 3 hardware buttons any day.
I was surprised that as a developer the poster complained about the trackpad so much. I wish I could get a system where I didn't need a pointing device at all. It just gets in the way of typing. I also personally hate gestures on trackpads. When I use them I only expect the level of interaction that I could get 10 years ago (move, click, right click, maybe scroll) and am frequently surprised by backward scroll axis, browsers going to the previous site etc. -- due to a brush with the track pad. The sooner trackpads are removed from these devices the better. That won't work for most people, but as a developer, I could do without it.
I haven't seen a trackpad with buttons for 8 years (Apple, Dell, Asus... ditched them between 2008 and 2012). People have chosen a long time ago, and physical trackpad buttons are a curiosity nowadays.
If they only could build decent trackpads and gestures that work. On my Macbook I can work perfectly well with only the laptop and the trackpad but on Windows the trackpad doesn't feel right and the gestures are weird.
The problem with trackpads are that you have to move your hand - great for normal browsing I suppose, but it sucks when you are writing code or typing.
What in the hell is wrong with buttons? They are easy to understand and work one hundred percent of the time. I have to use one at work, and I'll never buy one of these crappy button-less trackpads for personal use. Click-and-drag is a mind-melting experience.
O' how I despise the new trackpads that aren't merely trackpad pointing devices, but also buttons, scrollbars and other bullshit I never wanted too.
Christ. I need to move the fucking mouse cursor. And, shit on me, I did not intend on fucking clicking or swiping anything, or an other absurdly tangential but obliquely imaginable bullshit, God damn it.
The worst is when you have to press the trackpad to click the button, and as your fleshy fingers flatten out against the trackpad, it registers the pressure center moving slightly, and so the pointer moves, and you click the wrong God damned thing because the trackpad IS the button.
It was better when the buttons were separate plastic divisions disconnected from the motion tracking area.
I'm the opposite. I hate being able to click anywhere on a trackpad for left-click. It results in SO many false clicks, that I revert to using a small travel mouse. I much prefer old trackpads where you had clearly defined 'button' areas[1] at the bottom. I 100% blame Apple for the shift to buttonless trackpads.
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