Mac Book Pros Have a Wide Trackpad
My family (immediate family + both my mother and my mother in-law) was eating dinner in the Burlington Mall last night in Burlington, MA. Near the end of the meal, our seven month old daughter was getting cranky and needed to be walked. Knowing Apple recently blessed this mall with it’s presence I jumped at the opportunity to walk with the wee one and hunt down some Apple goodness.
First step: Fnd a directory. ~30 second walk, done. Second step: cross fingers and hope that the directory was updated (the Burlington Apple store is relatively new (couple months I think)). Yes, there it is, done. Third step: grok this stupid directory. Oh, there’s the “You are here sticker”, done. Fourth step: decide if the store is within “I’m just walking the baby” distance. ~1 minute walk, close enough, done. Fifth step: Make it so, done.
So I get to the store and stand in front of a Mac Book Pro. This is my first time seeing a MBP in the flesh. Same for my 7 month old, but she seems distracted by the 11-13 year olds running around the “iPod store”, or maybe she’s just admiring the design of the overall store, not sure. So I’m poking at the MBP, see that it’s a 2Ghz model, open a bunch of apps and realize it “feels” very similar to what would happen if I gutted my iMac and crammed it in my PowerBook (that’s what we’d expect). Then I start looking down at the keyboard and feeling around for heat. Then I look at the trackpad I’ve been using and say to myself “this thing has a jumbo trackpad”. I have yet to hear anyone mention this new wide trackpack. Seems like a great change to me. Well, great, so long as there’s still plenty of room for your wrists to rest. I couldn’t test this out since I had baby in arm but from seeing where my wrists lye with my PowerBook it seems it wouldn’t be an issue. Plus if it was, people would be complaining, right? Right.
MacBookPro:
PowerBook:
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April 12th, 2006 at 8:40 am
I like the idea of your daughter admiring the apple store design.
Maybe you should create an apple mobile consisting of full page advetrtisements for apple products so she can stare and get used to pleasant designs at such a young age. Hm. gift idea…
April 16th, 2006 at 10:21 pm
I’ve got the “wide trackpad” on my 17″ PowerBook 1.33Ghz. It’s pretty nice and I think it would also work on a 15″ bc I notice that there’s probably 2″ of space on the side of my wrists closest to the edge. And yea, if it didn’t have enough space, there’d definitely be complaints.
I wonder if they’ll ever introduce a control-click/right-click option on the MBPs though since all the new desktop Macs come with a Mighty Mouse.
BTW, my kids love going to the Apple Store too. They just run to the little kids station and start playing games.