A handful of new laptops announced at CES 2022 use haptic trackpads in exchange for a conventional touchpad. Here’s why.
Touchpads, trackpads, whatever you call them — it’s one of the most utilized parts of your laptop, and at CES 2022, it’s undergoing a major change. With four new flagship laptops opting for a haptic feedback trackpad rather than a physical click mechanism, the beginnings of a growing trend are building. And if you ask me, that’s a good thing. Of the best new laptops at CES 2022, it was impossible not to note the rising popularity of haptic trackpads. Lenovo was one of the first Windows manufacturers to try out haptics in a touchpad with the 2020 Yoga 9i. The feature spread to the ThinkPad Titanium Yoga in 2021. And now, this year, the new ThinkPad Z13 and Z16 both use this haptic trackpad, along with the refresh of the Yoga 9i. So yes, Lenovo is all in. But now, Dell, HP, and more have all jumped on the bandwagon too. Take the Dell XPS 13 Plus, for example. The haptic touchpad is built right into a single piece of glass that makes up both the tracking surface and the palm rests. There’s not even a line to distinguish the two. If it were only that device, I might chalk it up to a one-off experimental feature. When I saw that HP was announcing its first haptic trackpad on Chromebooks with the Elite Dragonfly Chromebook, I was convinced.
