Idea: Integrated trackpad on keyboard

[zeemeerman2]

Will it ever be possible on future Pro's/Airs to have the trackpad integrated on the keyboard, instead of being an apart part of the body?
So when you swipe 1 finger over your physical keyboard keys, you move the cursor. Two finger swipe: scroll. Tap on a random key of choice: left-click. Click on a "H" key, it types the "H".
And so on.

 

[Ledgem]

Will it ever be possible on future Pro's/Airs to have the trackpad integrated on the keyboard, instead of being an apart part of the body?
So when you swipe 1 finger over your physical keyboard keys, you move the cursor. Two finger swipe: scroll. Tap on a random key of choice: left-click. Click on a "H" key, it types the "H".
And so on.

This is an interesting idea, but it suffers from some practical problems.

First, note that on the modern MacBook Pro (and Apple external) keyboards the keys are spaced apart. Older MacBook Pro keyboards lacked spaces between the keys but still had raised and lowered segments between keys to separate them. In order to have smooth scrolling you would need to have all keys edge-to-edge, with no gaps or height differences. I've never seen or used a keyboard like that, but I would imagine that it would increase the typing error rate - and I say that as someone who has been typing for so long that the keyboard layout and key spacing is deeply engrained in my mind.

Second, there's the issue of accidental gestures and key presses. It would be very distracting to me if the mouse were jittering around the screen as I typed, but it would be even worse if some mouse movements or clicks (even with tap-to-click) resulted in keyboard input.

It can probably be implemented successfully, and perhaps some day we'll see it in use. In practice it might not even be that bad. It just seems to me that there are more usability issues that it presents and there isn't much to be gained from it in the process.

Again, very neat idea.