[justin66]

> But you can also pay $400 for a number of acceptable alternatives

I would pay more for an acceptable alternative - no fan, Windows 11, good battery life, top quality screen, no gimmick features (touchscreen! detachable screen! whatever).

No such thing exists, as far as I can tell.

[theultdev]

Don't forget the touch pad / gesture recognition.

You can tell Windows laptops are general computers, the hardware fires off the gesture recognition and gives the command to the OS, so you swipe, it's recognized, then you get the action.

On Mac, the gesture is registered as it's happening, you can pull the screen, cancel, flick it, etc.

Not to mention the convenience of taking it to any Apple store and the battery life.

I game on Windows, host on Linux, and travel with Apple.

[Solvency]

Can you explain technically the hardware difference here? Or is there none and Apple's track firmware/software is just better.

[tnmom]

Probably some vendor provides the trackpad, and provides a driver for that trackpad, and it recognizes the gesture and then sends Windows a `GestureHappened()` event.

Versus macOS being fully integrated and effectively generating `GestureProgress(0.31)` events.

[vient]

I don't notice anything unusual in that sense on MSI laptop with Linux. I start pinching, browser immediately performs gradual zoom. Swiping with 3 fingers immediately starts a "desktop switch" which is controlled by my movement - so I can pause, revert the gesture, and you will see on the screen exactly what you expect, second desktop partially showing, pausing, and then going back.

Can't test on Windows right now but I would expect it to have even less problems than Linux.

[theultdev]

It's possible things have improved, I haven't used a non Apple laptop in some time.

Last time I checked on Windows, swiping will result in basically an alt-tab after the swipe.

It was not a fluid motion that could be cancelled.