Nik Rawlinson
If you think the Magic Trackpad is an extravagance, you’re missing a trick.
My poor old mouse. Look at it. Quiet. Dormant. Collecting the dust and cobwebs. After so many years of faithful service, it has been cruelly cast aside and sits there quiet as a… well, as quiet as a mouse.
Why? Magic Trackpad – that’s why. I was entirely nonplussed with Apple’s little touch surface when it first appeared on my desk. It wasn’t comfortable, it felt so disconnected from my Mac, and just was far, far too big. But now it all makes sense.
I’ve tidied my desk (a rarity in itself) and found it a more appropriate position at the end of my keyboard. It’s a quick wrist-flick away from where I’m typing, and my mouse, which I hid behind my monitor to force me to use it, is entirely inaccessible.
The Trackpad is no longer a stretch and it’s starting to pay dividends. The in-built velocity makes swiping through lists and web pages a delight, and is something I now miss when I use a mouse at home. The size – it’s much squarer than an Apple display – also makes sense now that I’m using it on a dual-screen setup with a 4:3 ratio monitor plugged into my MacBook.
It’s not to everyone’s taste, though. As we point out in our review (see page 43), these aren’t groundbreaking features and they do little to justify the price. My Magic Trackpad isn’t mine at all – it’s Apple’s – and one day soon it will have to go home and the mouse will come back. At that point, I’ll have to decide whether it’s worth paying close to £60 to get back the features I’ll lose.
It’s an extravagance, but then so is an iPod, a book or a download from the iTunes Store. Belt-tightening times or not, we must be allowed to indulge ourselves sometimes, mustn’t we?
Therein lies the rub.
Apple’s genius is in creating products that we didn’t know we needed. In fairness, none of us needs an iPod – Sony Walkmans and those teaplate-like portable CD players worked perfectly well long before we’d ever heard of Jony Ive. None of us really needs an iPhone when Wap was fine for checking train times and sending brief notes to friends. Neither do we need the latest update to iLife when the previous version of the software catalogued our photos just fine, spliced our rambling movies into more meaningful stories and published our thoughts to the web without problem.
But that’s not so say that we shouldn’t want. ‘Want’, in moderation, is fine. It supports an active economy. It underpins gainful employment. It makes life better for almost all concerned.
The question is, would the thing you want – in moderation or not – make your life better, too?
