Apple Magic Trackpad Released; Why? Your Guess Is As Good As Ours
If you’re on the ball, you already saw this this morning. If not, welcome to the internet! Let me be the first to introduce you to the Apple Magic Trackpad.
Look familiar? If you use a Macbook at all, you’ll note that this is its trackpad, blown up to match the scale and angle of a wireless Mac keyboard. The device connects via Bluetooth and allows for a gestured-up multitouch experience. And the best part is, quite possibly, that it retails for only $69.
But hang on a minute. Look, Apple, you guys are the kings of interaction design, so I don’t mean to get on your case, and I’m going to reserve final judgment of the product until I try it, but… well, consider that the notebook mouse industry is enormous, and has been booming for two decades. Almost everyone who owns a laptop owns a mouse for their laptop. Why? Because trackpads freaking blow. Don’t get me wrong – a Macbook’s trackpad is wonderful with all its gestures and stuff, but for moving a pointer for any duration longer than a couple minutes, a good old mouse has yet to be dethroned.
“Ty,” you say, “you trippin’!” And maybe I am. I could use this in conjunction with a keyboard and a mouse, for sure. But I dunno, guys, I don’t have a lot of room as it is on my keyboard tray, and I’m willing to bet neither do you. Everything about the Magic Trackpad seems to reek of superfluousness. But who knows – we could stroll down to Best Buy later and be converted by the test model.
Maybe.
Aside from being a mouse replacement, there is one distinct feature that makes the Magic Trackpad indispensable. When Apple released Snow Leopard last year, one of the features touted was the ability to enter foreign language directly via the trackpad (the example used was Chinese). Unfortunately, the only devices able to take advantage of this feature were the MacBook’s. Now, all Mac’s running Snow Leopard can have that ability. Hopefully, with some additional apps down the road, we could use the Magic Trackpad with an updated version of Graffiti.
this seems to be a product worth attention, though I’d have to try it out before i buy it.
apple is like launching/upgrading products pretty fast these days :P, just looked at the upgrade on the iMacs [Processor and Graphic card]
This changes everything, yet again!
I think this looks great. I never use a mouse with my 13″ MBP.
Qualifier: I use JiTouch, which adds a ton of gestures to my trackpad, so it’s actually just annoying to use my mouse.