I’d love to hear that Framework is working on alternative touchpad options, particularly for those of us that live and die by the touchpad. I’m just getting a full week into use of my new Framework laptop. The feel is great and the design is great. It looks good, and it’s butter smooth to the touch. It’s responsive as well - no latency.
By far the most frustrating part of the entire Framework laptop user experience is the awful functional issues of touchpad. Most common problem is that of slide-clicks - where you go to click something using the press action, and without my finger actually moving, the cursor moves while clicking and either misses the button or worse, hits something else. It overshadows everything else. I band-aided mine by applying a patch of VHB tape in the shape/size of a touchpad button over the left-click area of the pad, topped with matte Scotch tape, which gives an identical finger-feel to the smooth glass touchpad surface. That prevents the pad from registering my finger there (like a hardware button). But I still end up with slide-clicks, somehow - though significantly reduced.
It really seems like it should be possible to design a pad with hardware buttons to fit in the same space (especially since my VHB tape fix extends ~1mm above the pad, yet the screen still closes fine - a real designed button area would likely be thinner). Modding-in such a thing is likely near impossible, given that the pad needs to be built to dimension spec, and the vertical size would need to be reduced for button space.
I just really, really, desperately wish companies didn’t try to copy Apple’s design, without copying what made it possible (excellent software/drivers/filtering and tons of refinement of the click mechanic), in the first place. It just ended up souring the whole computer experience by trying to shove a half-thought idea into the thing, and assuming everyone will use a mouse (I don’t).
I wish the Framework laptop made me as happy to use as the ThinkPad P52’s touchpad does. That thing is absolutely the benchmark for the best-performing touchpad I’ve ever seen in a Windows laptop. Maybe a point of reference, there?