Hands on with the Force Touch trackpad on the new 13 inch MacBook Pro

Michael deAgonia takes the new entry level MacBook Pro for a spin in this ComputerWorld review. What I found most interesting was the hands-on with the new Force Touch trackpad.

Superficially, the new trackpad feels like any other Apple trackpad. It is still coated in a layer of glass (which provides an excellent tracking surface), still takes up a third of the area available for palm rests and still supports multitouch actions and gestures. But longtime users will notice a different feel to the clicks when they’re pressing on it.

And:

A hard press on an icon’s text in the Finder allows you to edit its name, while a hard press on the icon itself brings up a window with a preview of the picture, video, or document, information about the file, and the option to open the file in the appropriate app. Another example: In the QuickTime app, the speed at which a video clip rewinds or fast-forwards depends on how hard you press on the trackpad.

Safari also supports Force Touch: Pressing down on the trackpad while the mouse pointer hovers over a word will display that word’s definition and thesaurus entries, while pressing down on a link will display a preview of that page in a pop-up window. You can scroll through the page or add it to your Reading List for later; clicking the preview page will open it in the browser.

Force Touch is a whole new piece of hardware, much like the Apple Watch. Both of these technologies will yield a rich vein of new user experiences. Yup, Apple is doomed.



6 thoughts on “Hands on with the Force Touch trackpad on the new 13 inch MacBook Pro”

  1. but will this shut up the troll crowd that claims apple only knows how to make things thinner and does not innovate? of course not.

  2. Yes, this, PLEASE. The new assembly is thinner, right? No reason they can’t do this.

  3. Was in fact saying the same thing: there should be space in the existing design to incorporate this, so “upgrading” the Magic Trackpad while maintaining the overall product feel should be possible.

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