Is Force Touch Trackpad Apple's answer to touch screen Windows laptops?

[saintforlife]

Following its March 9 media event where it introduced "Force Touch" trackpad technology for the new 13-inch Retina MacBook Pro and upcoming 12-inch MacBook, Apple opened up the feature to third-party developers by delivering developer APIs starting with the third beta of OS X 10.10.3. The APIs will allow developers to support the ability of Force Touch trackpads to sense multiple levels of pressure and perform different actions depending on how hard the trackpad is being pressed.

Apple has already taken steps to build Force Touch support into its own apps, as outlined in a support document. At the simplest level, the new Force Touch trackpads support a new "Force click" functionality, which allows a user to click on an item and then press a bit harder to activate a secondary function such as pulling up Dictionary or Wikipedia entires on selected text in Mail or Safari, a map preview when selecting an address, or Quick Look previews of files when selecting icons.

Beyond the single-level Force click, the new Force Touch trackpad also supports more advanced features through sensing multiple levels of pressure, allowing users to accelerate zooming in and out of maps or vary the speed of fast forward and rewind in QuickTime and iMovie. iMovie also supports "bumpy pixels" in which the trackpad gives subtle vibrational feedback during the editing process to let the user know when the end of a dragged clip has been reached or when cropped clips are in proper alignment.

https://www.macrumors.com/2015/03/24/inklet-force-touch/

Write and press and draw on the trackpad and leave the screen alone? Is this the direction Apple is heading towards to combat the touch friendly designs of Windows 8 and 10? After all, Apple came out and said they thought reaching out and touching the screen on a laptop using your fingers was bad ergonomics. So I guess since they can't back track now, they need to come up with a different solution.

 

[Jayayess1190]

Maybe, but is it not thinner than what was used before? I think it has more to do with making machines thinner.

 

[Yaboze]

I think being thinner is a part of it, but the fact that it needs the same pressure everywhere on the pad is key.

The very smooth gestures and overall sensitivity of even the original trackpad are incredible. Apple has stated that vertical touch screens were something they looked into it but they found them awkward.

I think the trackpad could evolve even more. Something a little larger with more "levels" that allows true Wacom-esque precision.

 

[jclardy]

No, the iPad is the response to those.

I own a Surface Pro 3 and find the only reason I use the touchscreen while in "laptop mode" is because the touchpad sucks. On a non-convertible laptop I don't see any reason to include a touchscreen.

I think people will understand Force Touch more once they put it into an iPad. Being able to "feel" the contents a touchscreen will be a giant breakthrough for iOS software. Just imagine being able to rest your fingers on the virtual keyboard, then feeling them "click" as your actually start typing.

 

[leman]

Write and press and draw on the trackpad and leave the screen alone? Is this the direction Apple is heading towards to combat the touch friendly designs of Windows 8 and 10? After all, Apple came out and said they thought reaching out and touching the screen on a laptop using your fingers was bad ergonomics. So I guess since they can't back track now, they need to come up with a different solution.

I think that Apple was always quite clear about preferring a good trackpad to a toucscreen on a computer. I don't think that the original intent is to 'combat' the touchscreen machines, but rather their own idea of improving how users interact with computers. The have introduced multi-touch and basic tablet functionality on computer trackpads long before touchscreen became mainstream on Windows machines. Pressure sensitivity is an obvious next evolutionary step.