MacBook Pro users will soon be pinching, swiping and rotating along with their Air counterparts thanks to today's refresh. But strangely, while Apple added its multitouch goodness to the high-end laptop, it neglected to alter the size of the trackpad.
Recall that the MacBook Air -- Apple's first notebook to incorporate some of the same multitouch gestures found on the iPhone and iPod Touch -- features a trackpad of substantial girth, the theory being that a larger pad facilitates these new multitouch gestures.
Some analysts expected that when Apple was ready to incorporate the same technology in its other notebooks (which does require a new trackpad and controller) the fatty variety would be incorporated too. Apparently not.
The reason for the omission, according to Yankee Group analyst Carl Howe, is entirely practical and related mainly to issues of design and consistency.
"The Pro has a lot more components than the Air," Howe says. "All those parts need electronics that connect to them. If you take the trackpad out of the Pro, you'll notice that to the left and right of it there's very little real estate."
So there you go. Adding a new, wider trackpad would likely require a complete redesign of the motherboard and some serious re-jiggering of the Pro's innards -- basically a MacBook Pro redesign. In the end, while Apple probably felt that multitouch was an important addition, it wasn't one that warranted a complete design overhaul...yet.
"This is not the revolutionary MacBook Pro, this is the evolutionary one," Howe says.
