Apple’s 45nm Refresh: New MacBook & MacBook Pro

Oh Hashmir, Multitouch Me Down There

Normally I don’t like reusing borderline comedic material from other reviews I’ve written but it’s late and I couldn’t type the word multitouch without giggling.

The MacBook Pro gets the same multi-touch technology from the MacBook Air’s trackpad. The multi-touch surface itself isn’t quite as large as it is on the Air, but the functionality is the same.

Two fingers on the trackpad will let you scroll up and down or left and right. Three fingers and you can swipe back and forth to traverse your web or folder history (as well as pages in Preview).

You get scroll, right click and zoom functionality with the base MacBook's touchpad but no ability to rotate or swipe-to-navigate

You can even rotate images by making little rotate motions with your fingers when in Preview or iPhoto.

I'm rotating this image entirely using my fingers on the touchpad

As I mentioned in the MacBook Air review, while I definitely appreciate the multi-touch features of the new notebooks (much more so than I expected actually) Apple is in dire need of better OS integration for the multi-touch gestures.

The latest example of this is the three finger swipe-to-navigate gesture. If you’ve got a Finder window open in column view and want to go forward in the directory structure, you can’t unless you’ve previously been there. The swipe gesture only controls the forward/back buttons in Finder, it doesn’t actually control traversal of folders.

Using three fingers to swipe works for going back, but you can't swipe forward here (see the greyed out forward arrow button in the top left of the Finder window)

Obviously this is something Apple is working on, as other OEMs are focusing many resources on touch-enabled interfaces for PCs. The Apple advantage is that it controls the software stack, so our expectations are higher - we want a version of OS X designed around touch, not one with some added touch UI functionality.

Think iPhone meets OS X, now make it happen Steveo.