Magic Trackpad

From the very first moment I used the multitouch trackpad on a MacBook Air I knew this was the way I wanted to work with my Mac. I held off upgrading to a MacBook Pro until Apple incorporated that same trackpad and, once I had it, I did not want to go back to a mouse. Unfortunately I had to.

Ergonomically speaking, notebook computers — all of them — are terribly designed. the screen is by necessity too close to the keyboard for good posture to be maintained while typing. It's just a fact of life. So you can't (or shouldn't) use a notebook computer as your primary or only work machine for any extended period of time without an external keyboard. Tragically, this also means you have to give up that lovely trackpad.

I spent the first week with my MacBook Pro using the trackpad exclusively, challenging myself to do without the mouse. Not only did I manage that, but putting the MacBook Pro on my desk and moving to the mouse was decidedly less satisfactory. So right then I started asking everyone I knew at Apple to develop a standalone version of the multitouch trackpad that I could have on my desk and never use a mouse again.

And finally Apple has delivered.

(I should point out that the mouse i was using was Apple's Mighty Mouse, which has its fair share of critics. I quite like it, but I acknowledge that my mousing experience may have been happier with a rather less Mighty contraption.)

The Magic Trackpad is larger than the trackpad on a MacBook Pro and supports all of the same multitouch gestures. This last is important — the Wacom Bamboo Pen + Touch has been around for over a year and offers its own set of multitouch gestures and can act as a pretty good substitute for the MacBook Pro trackpad, but its gestures are not the same as the MacBook pro's gestures. Likewise the Magic Mouse offers a sort of compromise between mouse and trackpad with its multitouch surface, but they're a different set of gestures again.

The Magic Trackpad, however, supports every gesture the MacBook Pro supports, including the four-finger swipe for Exposé that is probably my single favourite gesture. I also use the trackpad for clicking and dragging and scrolling — just about everything it can do, I do with it. And whether I'm using my MacBook Pro on its own or the Magic Trackpad on the desk (or iTeleport on the iPad) I use the same set of gestures to do the same things. The benefit in terms of usability of that simple fact is enormous.

As a side note, it's worth pointing out that the Wacom Bamboo Pen + Touch has a set of buttons that can be programmed to perform the functions of the gestures it doesn't support. Plus, unlike the Magic Trackpad, it can act as a tablet for a stylus. There is most assuredly still a place for that device for many users.

Aside from additional real estate, the Magic Trackpad offers another advantage over the MacBook Pro's trackpad in its slightly elevated and therefore more ergonomic angle. If you like to keep one thumb on the trackpad for clicking while you type, it's not going to be particularly good because it pushes the keyboard that bit further from you and the elevated edge is much higher than, for instance, Apple's own keyboards, making typing tricky. Using it off to the side as you do with a mouse, however, is very nice indeed and not having to grip something to drag it about has obvious ergonomic advantages.

Setting it up is fairly simple, though you do have to make sure you've got the latest Mac OS X plus a special software update for the Magic Trackpad that adds a few bells and whistles to the Trackpad pane of System Preferences and enables "inertial scrolling" which will feel familiar to iPhone and iPad users. Once all the software is installed, turn on the Trackpad and tell your Mac to pair it via Bluetooth Preferences. That's about it. Open up the Trackpad preference pane and tell the Mac which gestures you want to use and which you don't, and away you go. If you don't use it for a few minutes it powers down to conserve battery power, and wakes up again pretty much instantly when you touch it again.

In case you're wondering, you don't have to click using a tap on the trackpad. As with the MacBook Pro version of it, you can depress the surface of the trackpad for a physical click if you prefer. Indeed some Flash games don't recognise the tap-to-click, so a physical click is handy.

One other aside regarding the OS requirement: given that the majority of the computers Apple is selling these days are portables with multitouch trackpads, the market for the Magic Trackpad is limited to iMac and Mac Pro users who want trackpad functionality but didn't buy a portable, or MacBook/Pro/Air users who, like me, want one on the desktop as well. If I may offer one small tidbit of advice to Steve Jobs, it would be to make this product available to Leopard users.

I've probably spent far more words on this than a trackpad deserves, but the fact is I was waiting for Apple to deliver a product like this. I had high hopes and high expectations, and the Magic Trackpad exceeds those in almost every way.