Apple introduced* the Magic Trackpad a few days ago. For rather obvious reasons the computer mouse is bound to be dead. There is no way to properly add multitouch capabilities to standard mouses without flexing and bending your fingers into the most awkward positions. Wrists are wrecked because optical lasers fail to work on the smoothest and most expensive gaming trackpad. Scroll wheels clog up within a week (and because mouses are glued and not screwed, the dust is not removable and so the mouse ends up being hammered into pieces). Besides only having one button and constantly getting dirty, Apple’s mouses are the perfect example for these unmistakable mishaps.
With trackpads on the other hand, you get the most fluent finger movements, lighting fast scrolling and responsive precision. Apple’s laptop trackpads provide that. Other trackpads tend to be a mixture of friction-rich rubber fitted into a tiny rectangle lowered several inches into the laptop with half of the already tiny surface reserved for scrolling - take a look at Dell laptops. Nevertheless, trackpads are the future. Mouses were perfectly fine at a time where you placed cursors in Word documents and played Minesweeper. Nowadays things need to be handled with your fingers as if they were on your desk.
It is a late and long overdue movement in the right direction and not a genius strike in bringing the laptop trackpad to the desktop computer.
Verdict: Order it if have a desktop.
* Apple doesn’t really introduce things anymore. It just places the produce somewhere on the website without mentioning it on the front page and the Hot News.
