Baby Steps: The New Trackpad

With the MacBook Air, Apple introduced its first oversized trackpad:

The MacBook Air's trackpad

The size was necessary to enable more complex gestures; you could now rotate pictures just using two fingers and the trackpad. Neat. The MacBook Pro got the same functionality with its update earlier this year, and now with this last redesign both the MacBook and MacBook Pro have support for even more gestures.

The old MBP trackpad (left) vs. the new MBP trackpad (right)

Slide four fingers from top to bottom and you'll activate Exposé, slide them from left to right and you can switch between apps. The gestures are nice but are still gimmicky in my opinion; they aren't integrated well enough into OS X as the OS wasn't designed with them in mind. The usage experience I'm looking for is more Star Trek tablet - or iPhone like if you want a more realistic reference. I think we're getting there, and Apple is planting the seeds for such a transition, especially if you look at the sort of trackpad used on the new notebooks.

The new trackpad lacks any discrete buttons; instead, the entire pad can be depressed and acts as a physical mouse button. Keep one finger on the pad and push down on it for a single click, have two fingers on the pad and it's a right click. Scrolling is the best implementation I've seen on a trackpad; just take two fingers and move them up/down/left/right to scroll.

The pad is also covered with a thin piece of glass that makes gliding your finger on it much smoother, which is admittedly very nice. None of this is necessary for the current gestures but it gives us a good indication of where Apple is going with this. It won't be this year, it may not even be next year, but real multi-touch is coming to OS X. Wake me up when that day comes, because until then this bandaid of gestures isn't going to win me over.

While I wasn't won over by the gestures, I would be fine with the new trackpad if it didn't have so many problems. I have had some issues with clicks not registering; I'm not sure if this is a hardware problem or a software one. The trackpad would physically click but the click wouldn't register in OS X. This problem appeared more on the MacBook Pro than the MacBook, and it didn't matter where I clicked on the pad, it just wouldn't register. Eventually it would sort itself out and everything would be back to normal. It seems like other users are running into this same problem and Apple appears to be replacing notebooks, but there's no indication that it's actually a hardware issue. I'd suspect it's a software problem but it's honestly too early to tell. So far it seems like if you take your finger off of the pad before you click, then put it back on to click you're more likely to make the click register. Or simply enable tap-to-click and you'll avoid the problems altogether - not a real solution in my opinion but a workaround.

The trackpad is even worse under Windows for some reason. If you try pushing down on the pad to make it click under Windows, the cursor has a tendency to jump while it is very well behaved under OS X. Again, I have a feeling this is more of a software problem but who knows if/when it will be fixed.

Hooray for being an early adopter of Apple's finicky product.