> The mouse is a hardware sprite and its movement stays responsive and smooth even under heavy load and even when the OS freezes

Modern macbooks do something really interesting when the OS freezes. If the OS OOMs or something like a kernel panic happens, the trackpad stops clicking! There's something in the trackpad hardware that polls the OS and locks the trackpad when the OS stops responding so that it can't be pressed down to click anymore. Almost makes the OS feel like a real physical thing when this happens.

That’s because with most modern MacBook touchpads (bar the Neo) the touchpad never really moves much. It’s all force detection and a haptic feedback thingy. If the system crashes, it stops triggering the feedback.

The trackpad is not "locked", it's moving just as much as it used to, but the driver running the haptic fake click feedback is dead.

Apple's haptic technology is some deep black magic