Why not have multi touch technology using the trackpad?

[lamina]

The trackpads on the new MacBooks and newer PowerBooks and iBooks (I think) support 2-finger gestures such as scrolling... I just had a thought.

Why not have multitouch on the trackpad? We already kind of do... scrolling and such, so why not be able to use 2 fingers to stretch a photo or to 'flick' scroll like on the iPhone?

 

[DinnyHoon]

I think the technology on the trackpads of the Intel notebooks is actually multi-touch (I've definitely heard documentation refer to it as that), but the desktop OS doesn't support it as much as the iPhone.

 

[mkrishnan]

It's a good idea. Apple already went farther than most OEMs in terms of making trackpad scrolling intuitive. It'll be interesting to see what else can be done with it.

Although... I don't know how much the abilities of the new trackpads actually rely on any sort of hardware change, since iScroll2 is able to make the old trackpads do essentially everything the new ones can and then some.