I’m another. I’m a lefty that types with both hands, but I mouse right hand only.
I don’t think mice will ever go away. They hyperbole is that touchpads are all “pieces of shit”. If you don’t like them generally, that’s fine. If you use them, they don’t need to be improved and maybe I lack imagination but I don’t see how they can be improved.
Using the touchpad for anything but clicks cramps my neck and shoulders and makes me feel like I’m trapped in a tiny box. Navigating on a phone is the same. I’m left-handed and mouse with my right.
Then you’re actually agreeing with me.
As a replacement for mice they are.
They are good to have when you don’t have a better option. And as I said before, they replaced button mice (which have completely vanished) because they’re much better. As a complete replacement for mice, which I remind you is the statement I was replying to, they are awful.
I stand 100% behind my statement, as long as you don’t take it out of context. Which you were totally doing.
Real graphics designers use drawing tablets or touchscreens, not mice, though.
Up until now I thought that everyone was talking about touch screens. Yeah, I would carry a wired mouse into a cramped space before I would use a touchpad.
(But what was really great in cramped spaces like airplanes before touch screens was trackball mice. I would bring in my huge Kensington trackball mouse and sit it on my leg. I wouldn’t need to actually move the mouse in order to move the mouse cursor. I no longer use my laptop on airplanes, though, because it is too cramped to even open it up these days. That’s the one use case where I wish I had a tablet.)
They’re still around. I sometimes provide them for employees as an ergonomic option, though much less often than I might have years ago.
I tried really hard to use one as a replacement for my mouse at one point, but it triggered my old tendonitis issue (a work injury that happened when I was 19) and I couldn’t. I’ve lately found that a vertical mouse (one that has you holding you hand vertically, like a handshake) is the best for me.
That’s the big thing about ergonomics. What works for one person won’t work for everyone.
I do that while learning Hungarian on Duolingo: right hand for the many special character buttons and left hand nimbly hopping all over the keyboard like Paul Wittgenstein.
(How did we veer off on this tangent?)
I have used better and worse touchpads. The one on my Mac is just better than the one on my corporate laptop.
But i agree, they aren’t “pieces of shit”. I use a touchpad for everything except gaming. Maybe Atamasama is in a field where a mouse is better. As an actuary, i like not having to move my hands off the keyboard. And maybe I’m unusual, but i get a sore wrist from excessive mouse use, and can use a touchpad indefinitely without physical issues. The first time i used a touchpad was because i was developing some tendon issues from a pointing nipple, and my issues cleared up quickly after i shifted to the touchpad.
Nope, I do it that way as well. I’m a lefty that learned to use a mouse with my right when left-handed mice were uncommon and it seemed more natural.
Maybe for you. Not for me. They are better for many things.
Nope. This is simply wrong. As a replacement for you, they apparently don’t work well. You do not speak for absolute truth.
Game controllers may replace both mice and touchpads, though.
Which is basically a giant touch pad.
I’m the touchy feely type, myself.
Also, graphic design. That, that I did I used a pencil and a sketch pad.
As an artist I’ll never cotton to computer graphics. Just not a thing I think I could do or have time to learn much more than basics. So I’ll leave that to the people that love it and I’ll appreciate their art from here.
I just remembered when I learned CAD in college. It was a gigantic pad with a stylus that had a grid on it attached to a dumb terminal.
Keep in mind…
So no, I am not just giving my opinion on what I personally like or dislike. If we didn’t have mice at work, my life would be fucking hell. I am 100% objectively correct when I say that getting rid of mice and just using touchpads would be an awful thing to do.
Again, if you prefer a touchpad, great. The discussion isn’t personal preference. It’s the idea that mice will cease to be a mainstream consumer product because people prefer touchpads. That’s simply and provably false.
That is my point, and I do speak absolute truth on the matter. The idea that touchpads are replacing mice is not based on any actual evidence. The first widely-available touchpad came out 32 years ago. Mice are still ubiquitous.
I never claimed that touchpads will replace mice. I claimed that they aren’t “pieces of shit”, they aren’t “a tool of last resort”, and they aren’t “awful” as a complete replacement of mice, except in some activities (like gaming) where a controller is almost universally preferred to a mouse.
Different strokes and all that; I can’t wrap my mind around anybody feeling that a touchpad is an acceptable tool in any situation other than “Crap, I forgot to throw my mouse in the laptop bag”.
Again, that is what the discussion is about. As a total replacement for a mouse, it’s crap.
As something to use when a mouse isn’t available, it’s great. Again, for the third time, they replaced button mice. For background, button mice (also sometimes called a “pointing stick” or, ugh, “nipple mouse”) used to be something that laptops had in the middle of the keyboard. Believe it or not, laptops didn’t always have touchpads. When I first got started professionally in IT, touchpads were not rare, but they weren’t on every laptop. Sometimes you had what looked like a little pencil eraser in the middle of the keyboard, and if you pushed that around it would awkwardly move the mouse on the screen. Here is a picture as an example.
You would push that little green nub up to move the mouse up, down, to make it go down, left, right, etc. It was like a tiny joystick. You could not control how fast it moved, so precision was extremely difficult. The buttons beneath the keyboard served as mouse buttons.
Compared to that, a touchpad is so much more awesome. And a high-quality touchpad (such as one from Apple, who just makes great hardware in general) can be very functional. But for many people, using that for hours isn’t feasible. Objectively, they have much less precision than a mouse. And also, for many people (such as myself) using one for too long is physically painful.
That is why they are shit as a replacement for mice, on a general scale. And they are usually best to use when you are in a situation where there is no available surface to move a mouse around on, or when it’s inconvenient to carry a mouse. I literally use a touchpad every day I work. They have their place for sure. But that place isn’t as a replacement for mice, unless you are the rare individual who has a preference for that, and that is fine. Because as I said before:
But objectively, professionally, in my years supporting many, many people over the years, I can assure you that a touchpad works as a sole input device for a very small minority of people.
You know, we’d have more people talking about this fascinating discussion outside of the Pit. 
@LSLGuy, I’d blame you, but you already cop’d to it earlier!
Very early laptops had trackballs and two “mouse” buttons.
I do remember that! The button mouse thing was an attempt to use up less real estate as laptops were becoming more compact.