Once/if you take to it, it ruins all PC trackpads forever. The Synaptics drivers and their ilk are so bad. I switched to Mac for productivity in 2005 but have been without a Mac for 1.5 years presently.
I was wondering today why no other manufacturer has come close to the quality of the Apple trackpad. I use an external one at work and love the laptop ones. The face that the click isn’t physical but haptic feedback is amazing. I’ve spent hours trying to come to terms with that. It seriously fools my brain.
Update - I am living the trackpad life. I surrendered to the complexities of setting up a simple gaming mouse within MacOS and am finding that I actually prefer the trackpad after multiple days of use. I also purchased one of those Keychron bluetooth mechanical keyboards, but it felt like I was typing on a stack of books. Now I am back to my black Apple wireless keyboard and pretty happy. The keyboard on the MBP 16 feels very similar to the Apple keyboard.
Now if we can decrease the add-on costs of all of these “must-have” additional programs, I’d appreciate it. I only paid for malware bytes in Windows 10 and didn’t need to pay for something like CleanMyMac and some others.
Heck yeah, that’s what I use 99.9% of the time on my iMac. The pros use both a mouse and a trackpad, but I don’t think my brain could handle that. Everyone says BetterTouchTool is worth the money as well, but I have never really found the need. I do use BetterSnapTool, which is great.
Anyway, you can use a nice mouse with a Mac, just don’t install the drivers since they all suck. The OS handles the basics fine.
I have always used this until they went subscription based. I really don’t miss it. It does some neat stuff, like I loved the uninstaller, but I really don’t think I needed it. I have a ton of disk space, and I found the rest to be kind of frivolous.
I just use Hazel for uninstalling now. I have really never understood why the OS doesn’t have a proper uninstaller.
That’s what I use, too. Hazel is worth the money.
@Chris_Johnson FWIW, I use a trackpad and a Logitech Triathalon 720 Bluetooth mouse. The mouse has been great for me. It also pairs with three devices, so is very easy to use when I switch between work and personal computers, etc.
So given the feedback I tried my Logitech MX mouse (was going to return) again over bluetooth with no Logitech software. It worked great except I could never get the scrolling direction to change for some reason. I installed the SteerMouse drivers and it seems to work fine over Bluetooth. I will try a combination of trackpad and mouse and see if I really need a mouse.
I really only need the mouse for when I use Blender but it’s useful for anything where holding the mouse wheel in enables orbiting in 3D space.
I have now concluded that Apple’s mouse situation is as bad as Microsoft’s trackpad problem was in comparison to Mac trackpads for years. The gap between how good a Windows laptop’s trackpad works has closed significantly. The gap between mouse use in Apple vs. Windows is much larger. Simple things like setting the scroll direction for the mouse also changes it for the trackpad in MacOS. Razer has abandoned MacOS for the most part and Logitech should so that people won’t be tricked into installing their software. Bluetooth mice seem to always have some sort of delay issue compared to wired mice in MacOS.
The only really viable (consistent?) way to use the system is with a touchpad. No delay issues. No downloading random driver fixes for stuff Apple should fix. No constant switching the scroll direction when you use the laptop as a laptop.
I used to use a Logitech MX mouse with my Mac (no 3rd party drivers), I didn’t have any issues, especially this delay you are mentioning. I just don’t like the mouse acceleration curve on Macs.
A very timely article in Macworld. I finally settled on a Logitech Hero G mouse that works great (even with the G Hub software). The final annoyance is that you can’t have one scroll direction for mouse and one for the touchpad, or at least I have not figured that out yet.
Better-Touch-Tool supposedly has a setting for this. I don’t use it, but I have heard nothing but good stuff about it. I do use Better-Snap-Tool by the same company. They make good stuff.
It in fact does. But once again, another $8 fix (or $21 lifetime) for something that should be standard in the OS. I love my MBP 16, but am going to get my employer to get a Thinkpad P1 gen 2 and see if I am as happy. I also really like my P53, but that it is too big to lug around.
Ironically, what keeps me Apple everything else is what is making me less tolerant for all of these tweaks and add-ons in MacOS. I don’t like Android because it takes a lot of tweaking to get it how I like it (and there is no good tablet option). The only thing I’ve ever purchased for Windows 10 is Malwarebytes and Office365.
Apple really should fix it, it is ridiculous.
I don’t get your comparison to Windows 10 though. You don’t have to get any add-on’s except for crappy and expensive malware software because all those things just aren’t available, or aren’t done well. There is no Alfred on Windows 10, you can’t use a keyboard for almost everything on Windows 10, there isn’t a ton of great software out there to buy on Windows. Yes, Windows has far better mouse support, I’ll give it that, the lack of keyboard shortcuts alone drives me nuts on Windows.
Mac’s have their issues, but no more than every other PC I have used, it’s just a different set of issues.
Well, in some good news, turns out that the latest version of Razer Synapse 2.0 (1.87 I think) works with my Razer mouse, so I am happy again. The Logitech mouse is good, but not as good as my Razer Naga Trinity.
I don’t really use keyboard shortcuts so Alfred is interesting, but not a must have for me. Keyboard short cuts = using the Thinkpad red TrackPoint to me. People swear by both, but I am just not wired to use either.
Some of my problem probably is that I only have one Mac that I use consistently (MBP 16) and three PCs that I also use because some software works better in Windows. If I owned a Mac desktop that would just sit and run things for a while, I probably would like MacOS better. So maybe that is the ultimate solution. I need to go all in!
I am hoping that file transfer between Apple formatted external drives is faster than NTFS formatted drives (using NTFS for Mac).
Sigh, to get “smooth scrolling” with a mouse wheel I had to install SmoothScroll which is another $9 a year.
That is not worth it. Do you install it on PCs too?
Edit: I am a bit confused by this. Safari smooth scrolls already with my trackpad/Magic Mouse. Is it just that the Razor’s drivers suck?
Scrolling works great with the trackpad. It sucks for both the Logitech and Razer mice. Smoothscroll makes it much better (in Chrome).