robin
November 3, 2021, 3:25pm
19
illeatmyhat:
My initial impressions with the laptop’s hardware is that the touchpad is annoying to use compared to the one on any MacBook.
The issue is that the top region of the touchpad is not clickable, requiring the user to take their finger off the touchpad and click using a lower region of the touchpad.
I made a similar point in the relevant blog post’s thread. Hinged touchpads are not the only option on the market; perhaps other types of touchpad were considered too expensive, but I hope they’ll be an option in the future. (I haven’t had time to research the hardware/documentation issues mentioned below – that all input is routed through the touchpad though an unspecified “single cable system” – and didn’t receive any responses about it, so I don’t know how feasible DIY experimentation would be.)
The touchpad sounded great, until I read this detail. Assuming @jeshikat is right about the hinge, will it be practically feasible for users to experiment with other kinds of touchpads, assuming they have sufficient skills in electronics, programming, etc. and are willing to modify their Framework in the process? Or do Framework themselves perhaps plan to offer other options?
Subjectively speaking, I’ve never liked using hinged touchpads of any kind in the past and I wouldn’t expect the user experience to be radically different with Framework’s touchpad, however well-engineered it is in other respects. (Personally I’d prefer to use a hingeless capacitive touchpad – ideally with a few physical buttons to make middle-clicking easy, though a pressure-sensitive touchpad might be able to emulate three buttons well enough; for example something from the Cirque GlideSense series might work – that’s just the first example I found of a hingeless and pressure-sensitive touchpad).
If the touchpad simply communicated directly with the mainboard I’d expect it to be relatively straightforward to experiment with other options (possibly involving simple electronics work, 3d printing, etc. to make them physically and electronically compatible with the Framework), but the blog post notes:
Like all modules in the Framework Laptop, the touchpad is easy to replace if you ever need to. We also routed the keyboard and fingerprint reader signals through it, simplifying the system to have a single cable that connects all of the input devices to the mainboard to make upgrades and repairs easy.
…and it’s not clear from that brief description how nontrivial it would be to integrate a third-party touchpad using, e.g., an I2C or USB interface with the single-cable system. (Maybe it would be doable using a small microcontroller integrating all three signals and routing them to the mainboard itself, or something along those lines.) I’ll look for documentation that might clarify things, but additional insight from people who understand these topics better than I do would certainly be appreciated!