Screens are dramatically better than a few years ago and have been advancing if you care about and shop for the feature. Trackpads are slowly sucking less.
Most people only see this in MacBook Pros, but the other manufacturers have excellent screens that are often hidden behind customization options and complex models/branding.
I have a framework and love it, but it’s a computer made for a specific purpose that doesn’t align with most people. That’s ok - Dell makes like 500 different let laptops and Framework has a totally different proposition.
I have to disagree on trackpads sucking less. This year I walked into a big box electronics store and tried the screen, keyboard and trackpad on every laptop they had on display.
Trackpads were universally abysmal, with the sole exception of the macbooks. They all had the frustrating diveboard design, every single one at every price point from every manufacturer. I’m sure you can buy laptops with decent trackpads online, but they had none in the store, macbooks excepted.
Keyboards were all over the place, but I notice that even some premium models are now carrying generic low end keyboard parts with weak travel, lack of key separation, num lock mashed into the backspace, and awkward arrow key layout. If anything I think keyboards are getting worse.
Screens are the one place where I’ll say things have improved noticeably, especially colors and black levels, although getting over 200 ppi and 500 nits is still a rare treat, and that is my bar for a compromiseless display.
> walked into a big box electronics store
You're comparing Apple to unnamed computers brands you touched at a random place, I'm not sure what to make of it.
For instance how does the Macbook Air compare to the current 13" Surface Laptop ? Is that what you call diveboard design and awkward arrow key layout ?
I didn’t say good just less bad.
Apple obviously produces the only product incorporating a touchpad that applies any significant, deliberate thought about it.
500 nits is not really good enough for laptop that you might use outside.
Luckily they are still improving and we now have Tandem OLED with about double that.
Should a laptop be optimized for indoor or outdoor use?
Given the primary selling point of laptops is their portability (often at the cost of other things), they should be optimized to be highly usable wherever they might end up getting used.
> Trackpads are slowly sucking less
This is an oddity of the PC laptop market I have never understood - Mac trackpads from a decade ago are still better than a top-of-the-line PC trackpad from the current year.
The only thing Apple has done in that decade is make their trackpads slightly bigger (and made the click haptic rather than physical), so it feels like the PC folks should have caught up by now...
Part of it is software (drivers), and that’s something that hardware vendors have traditionally been poor at writing. The bar for a driver is “it technically works and doesn’t bluescreen” rather than “it works well”. It’s just more evident in this case because the continuous-input nature of a trackpad makes the poor functionality much more apparent.
The other is that I don’t think most laptop vendors spend nearly as much on their trackpads. MacBook trackpads have for a long time shared their touch sensitivity hardware with iPhones, which makes them extremely responsive and precise, and this is paired with a high end haptic motor to produce click sensations. Finally, their surface is oleophobic glass which reduces friction. This all combines to produce a great experience, but I’m positive that they cost notably more than the typical plastic diving board fare, and most laptop manufacturers are squeezing out margin with cheaper parts wherever they can.
Apple pours all they have into making their trackpad the best it can be, including working from the OS to the UX to the SDKs.
It's sailant when using the Magic Trackpad on Windows: the acceleration curves don't match, the keyboard combinations are less natural, the gestures clunkier and the overall advantage of the trackpad is I think lesser. Mouses are a better fit on windows in every respects IMHO.