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Oh, and did I mention that it does Force Touch? The entire top of the Magic Trackpad 2 is a touch surface-measuring 4.5 inches tall by 6.3 inches wide (the old model was basically a five-by-five square)-and its surface area is 29 percent larger than the old model. Apple says the Magic Trackpad 2 can last a month or more on a single charge, and it takes about two hours to charge it back up.Īlso gone is the silver color scheme-the Magic Trackpad 2 is all white, color matched to the keycaps of the Magic Keyboard rather than its aluminum frame. This new trackpad, like the new Magic Keyboard and Magic Mouse 2, is rechargeable via a Lightning cable-in this case, it’s located on the back of the trackpad. Gone is the big hump at the top that wrapped around the two AA batteries that powered it. The new $129 Magic Trackpad 2 is strikingly different in appearance from the original. And as of today, with the arrival of the Magic Trackpad 2, the Magic Trackpad is bigger and better than ever. (Like the name implies, trackpads really do feel quite similar to trackballs in terms of feel, at least for me-it’s all about big open-handed gestures instead of tiny, careful death-grip movements.) The moment I first saw a desktop trackball, in the offices at MacUser, I was hooked.Īfter years of using Apple’s trackpads on laptops and getting used to all the fancy multi-touch gestures, I finally switched from a trackball to Apple’s Magic Trackpad on the desktop. My first computers didn’t have them, and by grad school I had switched to a PowerBook with its built-in trackball, so there was only a narrow window of three or four years where I used a mouse every day.
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Warning: This story has not been updated in several years and may contain out-of-date information.
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