Why Windows 8 Might Force Microsoft into the Laptop Game

Commodity hardware isn't enough to provide a great experience.

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Farhad Manjoo has a great column on the pitiful performance of PC trackpads:

I switched to Apple notebooks more than five years ago, and I did so precisely because of things like the trackpad. I've searched high and low for a Windows notebook with a touchpad that comes close to the buttery bliss offered by the MacBook line. I haven't found it, and you won't either. At best, you'll find a trackpad that can perform satisfactorily after you tweak a lot of settings-which may work fine for pros, but it's not the kind of just-works experience that most computer users want.

This has been my exact experience as well. The thing that sold me on Macs wasn't OS X-it was the trackpad. Of course, Apple has a natural advantage here-because it has complete control over hardware and software, it can achieve the tight integration necessary to make a highly responsive trackpad. By contrast, PC manufacturers-who rely on commodity parts–can't fine tune components to Windows.

Now that Microsoft has entered the hardware game with Windows 8 and the Surface, it will be interesting to see if they take a similar approach to laptops. Already, Steve Ballmer has adopted the language of Apple's approach to computing:

"We believe that any intersection between human and machine can be made better when all aspects of the experience - hardware and software - are considered and working together."

Given the extent to which the Metro interface in Windows 8 is even more dependent on an accurate trackpad than OS X, I wouldn't be surprised if-within the year-Microsoft is unveiling laptops tailored to the experience it wants to provide.

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