While much of the recent Apple announcement was focused on the Watch, there was something else that piqued my interest in the form of a new Macbook.

I don’t want to dwell on specs, USB-C and all the other miscellaneous criticisms much of the tech press have focussed on (except to say that I think there’s a large number of my clients for whom this laptop would be absolutely perfect – not everyone needs the connectivity that seems to be missing on the new Macbook), but I was particularly curious about the new Force Touch trackpad that features on the new model, and that I expect will be slowly rolling out across the rest of the range.

So what’s Force Touch? It’s Apple’s name for Haptic Feedback technology – which is electronic feedback that simulates physical interaction. In this case, the trackpad is no longer a movable button – it’s now just a solid glass plane that senses the user’s force against it, and reacts accordingly. What’s extremely clever is that by using vibration devices under the glass, the device ‘feels’ like you clicked it. The advantage of this is that the whole trackpad is now ‘clickable’ (but it doesn’t click at all of course).
That’s the theory, and it sounded great, but I was really curious as to how it worked in practice. So I took a trip to my local Apple store to check it out.

Currently the Force Touch trackpads are installed in just the 13” Retina MacBook Pro, so I headed straight for them. Unfortunately though, the ones I checked were the regular trackpads. I clicked the trackpad, and it definitely moved. But wait….it also clicks higher on the trackpad. Could this be? I went into System Preferences and checked whether this model was an ‘old’ or ‘new’ MacBook Pro, and to my surprise it was the new one. I turned the machine off to see if the trackpad clicked without power, and sure enough the trackpad never moved at all.

Now I’d heard people describe the new trackpad design as mind-boggling, but now I’ve experienced it myself I can’t deny that it really is technology that messes with your head. I was absolutely sure that I was clicking down, yet there was no movement to allow me to do so. The haptic engine was giving me the feedback that I had clicked, confusing my senses totally. This was doubled when you ‘clicked’ once, and continued to press down for a second deeper click that felt completely natural.

I’m sure most people reading this will probably be thinking ‘yeah, that’s great……but what’s the point?’. Well, right now the advantages of Force Touch are few and far between. The clickable area on the new trackpad is, well, the full trackpad (rather than the bottom 75% you could click on the older hinged version). Applications will now be able to make use of the trackpad having pressure sensitivity, an example of which you’ll see in scrubbing through videos where a deeper press will fast forward/rewind quicker.

But this is the first generation of haptic device available in an Apple product, and that’s why I find this exciting. The feedback I got from the trackpad was so believable I can’t help feeling that this is a technology of huge interest. In future we’ll see developers make real positive use of the trackpad, and that as always will influence how Apple builds haptics into their future products. Maybe one day we’ll see an iPad with haptics that mimic a real physical keyboard on the screen (it’s believed to be possible). And if that doesn’t mess with your mind, nothing will!