This is the biggest waste of words next to a “Trump-said” article.
Laptop makers once put pop-out mice on laptops. They were horrible. Toting a wired mouse around was a pain in the ass too. There’s a reason touchpads took over. It doesn’t mean people don’t know how to work a computer.
And just because a laptop has a trackpad doesn’t mean people don’t use them with their laptops. Our office is 90% Macbook pro and of those users only 10% use a trackpad (the external bluetooth one at that, not even the built in one)
As of 2024, Apple sells just one computer with a mouse included
Apple sells 0 mice with 90% of their computers, the iMac is the only model that comes with any external peripherals besides a charger. The Mac mini has always been a “bring your own keyboard and mouse” type device, and the Mac Pro/Studio are for people who probably already have a keyboard and mouse.
I like their trackpads a lot, but if you use the MacBook with an external monitor like so many of us do, it’s simply not an option. I stick with Logitech for mice though. Even their crappy mice are good, and their high end mice are great.
I also have to disagree with the author’s take on the evolution of the mouse. I like having buttons to navigate forward and back when browsing the web, I like the multifunction scroll wheels, and I even like the sideways scroll wheels when looking through large charts or tables of data. When I used to game more on services like WoW, I had a mouse with a ton of buttons mapped to all kinds of macros and skills.
The only people I don’t see using mice or external trackpads are PM types who don’t use external monitors and spend 80% of their days moving from meeting to meeting.
I still use a mouse with my laptops. The button-less track pads are junk. Most programs are not optimized for touchscreen use and I don’t want fingerprints all over my screen anyways. The Thinkpad trackpoints are OK, but they are not usable in CAD software that needs 3 buttons and a scroll wheel to navigate.
I use a MacBook Pro at work, and supposedly it has a fantastic touchpad, yet I use a mouse when I can. I don’t even do CAD, I just don’t like trackpads. I use a Logitech Master MX 3 at work, which has two scroll wheels, back/forward buttons, and a thumb button, and it works well. At home, I have the Triathlon, which I actually prefer because I seem to constantly hit the side scroll wheel on accident.
I love my personal ThinkPad with a TrackPoint though. It’s great for pretty much everything except CAD. There are three buttons, so it can scroll, it’s just awkward to switch between scrolling and rotating. When I mess with modeling, it’s on my desktop with a proper mouse anyway.
FreeCAD has a navigation method specifically for trackpads
The Apple trackpad has remained in my opinion the best one ever developed and continues to improve generation to generation. They lost the script on keyboards for a hot minute there, and their mice have always been horrible to the point of deliberate non-functionality, but those trackpads are amazing. Their external trackpad has also come a long way in the past few years.
The mouse was never the best tool for a lot of computing jobs, it was just what caught on.
I still primarily use my computers as a desktop, and I don’t like it when software requires me to reach over to my pointing device. When it does, the majority of the time I reach for a trackball which is far more comfortable.
After dabbling with tiling windows managers in Linux some years ago, I came to realize that pointing devices are often the slow way to do things.
The main thing I want a pointing device for these days is for scrolling through documents and web pages, and the vast majority of mice are just bad at that. Precision scrolling is only available on a handful of mice, and its niche enough that consistent software implementation is just not a thing.
I’ll still keep a mouse on hand for playing the occasional video game that works better with one, but that’s not really how I like to play games usually.
Back in something like 2003 the computer I had at work had a trackball instead of a mouse. I hated it, until I finally replaced it with mouse and found myself really missing my trackball. Still use them 20+ years later.
My wife still only uses Logitech track ball mice on her desktop. On the rare occasion I need to use her oc for something, it’s always an interesting time haha. Only takes about 10 seconds to be ‘calibrared’ to it now.
I’m also using a trackball, it was Logitech ones and now a Sanwa Gravi
I’ve been on a Penny & Giles for over 10 years. Couldn’t compute without it.
nice one :)
I started with Logitech, now I use Elecom.
Been using the Kensington Expert Wireless a couple of years now.
I’m too sensitive for a trackpad. I hate touchscreens.
Look, early Android phones had a tiny trackballs, some buttons and even physical keyboard.
Who wants a stylus?
👀
I miss the physical keyboard of my first phone. It was so cool! I filled flipped out open and turned out horizontal to thumb type.
It was really hard moving to a virtual keyboard. Swype helps but it also make a ton of mistakes too.
My go to smartphone keyboard is MessagEase. A few larger buttons instead of many small. You can get quite fast on it, and larger buttons means fewer mistakes.
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