Why Would Apple Put Glass Trackpads on the New MacBooks? Here’s Why…
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In the last couple of days, a flurry of speculation has erupted over the rumor that the forthcoming MacBooks will feature glass, multi-touch trackpads. The comment that keeps getting made is that it makes no sense to have glass trackpads unless you need to see what’s underneath them, as in a little screen.
“Why would Apple do that?” people keep asking.
Isn’t it obvious? If Apple was going to make a MacBook Touch, would you really want to be touching the primary screen? No, it would get tedious, as my five days with an HP TouchSmart taught me. Plus, certain gestures are just awkward when trying to touch-control a vertical screen, including simple scrolling up.
Fine, so just use the touchpad then for multi-touch and gesture operations, right? But wait a second…won’t it get frustrating touching the touchpad and hitting the wrong area?
Not if the touchpad has a miniature version of the primary display underneath it.
You’ve now solved both problems: You get to use multi-touch / gestures on a horizontal surface, which is much more natural, and you eliminate the problem of mis-tracking your target. In fact, this seems like such a great idea that if the new Apple laptops aren’t set up this way, I’d be surprised if they’re not working on it for the next revision.
We’ll find out soon enough…
July 31st, 2008 at 11:31 pm
The one thing you forgot is that your large fingers won’t be able to accurately target anything on the tiny trackpad.
You’d get so frustrated you’d want to smash the glass of the pad within 10 minutes.
August 1st, 2008 at 6:11 pm
Keep in mind, though, that it wouldn’t need to be perfect, just better than not having something there at all.
After all, you wouldn’t want to put your fingers on the pad to scroll something and instead drag something. If you can get close enough, it should be good enough.
Admittedly, though, the big difference between this setup and normal trackpad-ing is that normal tracking is relative, whereas this would be explicit, location-wise.