Remember the recent leaks showing some kind of trackpad device that Apple appeared ready to release? It’s real and it’s here, and it’s the Magic Trackpad. Sadly, Bigfoot remains as elusive as ever, but we can’t have everything, can we?
The Apple Store has been down for several hours on Tuesday morning, and now that it’s back we have a few goodies to reveal. On the new front is the Magic Trackpad, first revealed in leaked photos weeks ago. Priced at $69, Apple claims that it’s the largest Multi-Touch trackpad ever, asking “Why should notebooks have all the fun?”
“Desktop users, your time has come,” the Magic Trackpad product page proclaims seductively. “The new Magic Trackpad is the first Multi-Touch trackpad designed to work with your Mac desktop computer. It uses the same Multi-Touch technology you love on the MacBook Pro. And it supports a full set of gestures, giving you a whole new way to control and interact with what’s on your screen. Swiping through pages online feels just like flipping through pages in a book or magazine. And inertial scrolling makes moving up and down a page more natural than ever. Magic Trackpad connects to your Mac via Bluetooth wireless technology. Use it in place of a mouse or in conjunction with one on any Mac computer -- even a notebook.”
Magic Trackpad gestures include Click, Scroll, Swipe and Rotate, including two-finger scrolling, pinching to zoom, rotating with your fingertips, three-finger swiping and activating Exposé or switching between applications with four fingers.
In a first for Apple, the Magic Trackpad uses high-performance AA NiMH batteries and the company is offering the Apple Battery Charger as “a more environmentally friendly way to go wireless.” Unlike many chargers that keep pulling juice after the batteries have charged, Apple’s Battery Charger “automatically reduces the amount of power it needs” when they’re done charging to avoid energy waste.
Magic Trackpad is $69 and available now to ship within 24 hours as of this writing; it requires a Bluetooth-enabled Mac computer (desktop or laptop) with Mac OS X Snow Leopard 10.6.4 and “latest software update,” which we presume means that a Software Update is coming shortly to make this thing work with our existing systems.
We don’t know about you, but we’ve been waiting for something like this from Apple for a long time! Oh happy day!
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