“The exclusivity of Apple’s new multi-touch trackpad to the company’s MacBook Air family of notebooks won’t last long,” Kasper Jade reports for AppleInsider.
“In very much the same way that iSight video cams have become commonplace on nearly all of Apple’s personal computer systems, the Mac maker will reportedly scale the gesture-based input technology across its notebook lines during the course of the year,” Jade reports.
“The next models to receive the oversized trackpads will be updated 15- and 17-inch MacBook Pro models due for an introduction in the next several weeks, people familiar with the company’s 2008 product roadmap say,” Jade reports.
“According to those same people, the new notebooks will also be the first from the Cupertino-based company to employ Penryn-based Core 2 Duo mobile process from Intel Corp., which in their most likely form for the MacBook Pro would range in clock frequency from 2.5GHz to 2.6GHz with 6MB of Level 2 cache,” Jade reports.
More in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: It would be nice if Apple added the MacBook Air’s multi-touch capabilities to existing MacBooks and MacBook Pros which already feature two-finger scroll, horizontal scrolling, zooming, and secondary (right) clicking via their Trackpads.
The MBA seems to be selling a lot of MacBooks. People are more confirmed in their mind of its value.
MacBook Air is currently the 6th best selling portable on Amazon. Somebody is ordering them.
Why do analysts act like they had this epiphany that a new technology would be integrated throughout Apple’s product line? “We think Apple will use a little red mousestick for the next MBP update.” At least it would be refreshing.
Don’t look for Apple to update current MBPs or MacBooks with multi-touch features. They didn’t the last time an update came out. I recall installing a third party hack on my PowerBook to get the two-fingered scroll (boy, that sounds like some kind of insult or something naughty!), which was rendered useless by the next OS X update.
The new multi-touch scroll pad will be a selling feature for the new MBPs. Apple doesn’t have much incentive to make a firmware/software update for older MBPs.
Newest Rumor: Next-gen MBP will run on electricity!
I’m STILL waiting for an external multi-touch trackpad… and I can’t be the only one.
iScroll 2 gave my PB G4 the power to use the two finger scroll… It force enables the System Preference… which means that such “multi-touch gestures” are fully capable in the hardware, even from years ago.
Since the capability is going to be added (revealed?) in Leopard I think we can all rest assured that someone somewhere is going to make all of our trackpads like new.
Here’s the iScroll 2 link:
http://iscroll2.sourceforge.net/
For freak’s sake! What a hero this Kasper Jade is – predicting what Steve *announced* in his keynote.
Steve specifically said the rest of the MacBook lines would be getting multi-touch touchpads.
So it doesn’t take any brains at all to work out this would occur at the next revision.
I’ve got a Powerbook G4. What are the odds there will be an iScroll 2-D?
I predict the HD will get bigger, there will be multi touch pads in all and there will be new models of the iPod and iPhone later in the year.
Who do i give my details to so I can have my check delivered.
And in further astonishing news-water is wet, the earth is round and Apple will release a new fangled gadget called a computer.