Lenovo continues to prove that every other touchpad is inferior with its new ThinkPad

Touchpads are vital in any laptop, but ask reviewers in the industry, and they’ll tell you the unfortunate truth: Laptop touchpads aren’t great (for the most part).

There are exceptions. MacBooks have always had excellent trackpads with reliable consistency, yielding smooth surfaces and seamless clicking. Lenovo offers its own unique spin with the three-button clickpad. It features dedicated buttons so you can simultaneously drag your finger along the surface while clicking on each button with a separate finger.

Beyond that, a majority of the touchpads I test have similar issues:

• A surface that isn’t fully clickable, often in the upper portion. Dragging files around is difficult when your click unregisters as you go higher up on the touchpad surface.
• Clicking down requires a lot of pressure, which can slow down the user’s attempts to browse while pressing on the surface, especially compared to a mouse.
• The surface itself might have too much friction and lack smoothness, making it frustrating to navigate the cursor.

Not all touchpads suffer from the same problems, but these frequently come back to haunt me between each laptop I test.

While the aforementioned Lenovo clickpad solves each of those issues by separating the touch surface and buttons into two separate entities, my recent testing with another Lenovo laptop, the ThinkPad X9-14 Gen 1, proves that this isn’t the only way: Enter the haptic touchpad.

Lenovo’s haptic touchpad should be the new norm

What is a haptic touchpad, you ask? It’s a touchpad surface without actual buttons, but instead utilizes a force sensor that manufactures the feeling of a click through feedback when applying enough pressure. Lenovo’s haptic touchpads, in particular, are manufactured by Sensel, a company that specializes in the technology, also providing for Microsoft and Dell.

But what does it actually feel like to use a haptic touchpad? My first hour with the Lenovo ThinkPad X9-14 Gen 1 was weird, I will admit. The touchpad is incredibly sensitive, and it took time for my brain to adjust how I used the touchpad. That’s because I realized that it addresses every single one of my issues:

• The surface is fully clickable, which is a result of there being no actual surface to click. It’s reliant on the haptics registering pressure and then providing feedback, which ensures that you won’t accidentally deregister a click when going too high in the surface, as every part of it has the sensor.
• Clicking down requires very little pressure. While this took time to get used to, I was in bliss with how little I struggled dragging files around. I didn’t keep accidentally unclicking, and there wasn’t a ton of friction preventing me from moving the cursor.
• The surface feels immensely smooth, as if my fingers are two skates gliding around an ice rink.

However, it takes time to get used to, so if you get a chance to test the technology yourself, you’ll need to use it for more than a few minutes before deciding if it’s right for you. It took an hour to get into the rhythm of its sensitivity, yet after pushing past the unfamiliarity of it, I became a believer.

Other laptops should start adopting the haptic touchpad

I don’t want to use a normal touchpad ever again. Traditional touchpads require far too much pressure, are inconsistent with clickability, and rarely yield a smooth tracking experience.

I’m ready for the industry to embrace that haptics are the future. In the same way a vast majority of laptop manufacturers have accepted that SSDs are the superior method of storage over HDD, this industry needs to come to a consensus on haptic touchpads: They’re excellent, and we should see most laptops boasting them.

There are two reasonable exceptions, however, with the first being budget laptops. Haptic touchpads are only available in Lenovo’s premium products, which makes sense, as it’s likely more expensive to manufacture than a traditional click touchpad.

On that same note, the second exception would be gaming laptops. There’s no reason to have to spend more money on an already absurdly expensive gaming laptop just for a touchpad you won’t end up using, as most gamers are either plugging in an external mouse or are using a gamepad. It’d be a pointless additional cost, unless you use your gaming laptop for both work and play.

Otherwise, productivity laptops and business laptops would benefit greatly from adopting the haptic touchpad. Haptics opened my eyes to just how smooth and seamless a trackpad experience can be.