The Magic Trackpad may not be Apple’s attempt to completely replace the mouse, but when you can fit almost your entire hand on it, it’s easy to see how it could turf your USB rodent off your desk. Does it deserve pride of place on your worktop, or is it an expensive waste of space? Read on and find out in our Magic Trackpad review.
The Magic Trackpad feels like an inevitable step down Apple’s design road after the ingenious but slightly uncomfortable Magic Mouse. However, it’s a welcome one: Apple’s multitouch gestures on MacBooks are superb, and the Magic Trackpad does a fantastic job of bringing them to your desktop set up – with just the right changes to adapt properly.
Set up is fairly painless: on Snow Leopard, you’ll need to grab a 75MB update that comes in at just under 82MB when installed, but it’s a one time necessity and you’re done.
Trying out the Magic Trackpad for the first time, you’ll be struck by just how expansive it is. You can slap almost an entire paw on it without trouble, and compared to the postage stamp sized area on a MacBook, it’s a vast expanse of responsive glass. In fact, it’s so vast, your fingers will go skittering across it, hurling the cursor across the screen. There’s a learning curve to the Magic Trackpad, and we found that we had to turn down the sensitivity, but you’ll soon be diving around OS X in no time at all with it.
The gestures themselves are exactly the same as the ones you may well be used to on a MacBook or MacBook Pro already (Plus a new three finger drag, though in practice we don’t use it much), and work just as smoothly on the larger surface.
The reason the gestures have coped so well when transplanted to the Magic Trackpad is its superb ergonomics. As well as looking polished and streamlined to match the Apple wireless keyboard, the way in which it clicks down differs to the trackpad on a MacBook.
Where MacBook trackpads click down from the top, making the portion of the trackpad nearest the keyboard impossible to push, the whole surface pops down a tad through switches on the corners. That’s important as in practice, your fingers will rest close to the top of the Magic Trackpad.
As you can tell by the emphasis on gesture input and touch surfaces, Apple’s aiming to make casual computing even easier, and some of the tricks that work on the iPhone or iPad work with the Magic Trackpad too. Our Pogo Stylus pen works a treat, though you have to push down ever so slightly harder than on the iPad, and we were doodling away, and even signing virtual signatures.
But even so, as with the capacitive screens on Apple’s iOS gadgets, while incredibly responsive, the Magic Trackpad isn’t pin point accurate as a mouse can be. For people who use OS X for design and multimedia editing, or even regularly simply moving a lot of files to and fro, it’s just not as effective as a good old fashioned mouse, and you’ll find yourself drawn back to one for Getting Things Done.
However, for casual computing, the only other criticism we can offer is that the batteries included with the Magic Trackpad aren’t rechargeable, rather than plain old AAs. It’s an Apple gadget, so you know you’re going to pay a lot, but the Magic Trackpad still delivers, even if you just use a MacBook on your desk more than on your lap.
