Compromises Limit Appeal of Apple's MacBook Air Laptop

Gesture of Support

As is often the case when Apple introduces new MacBook models, the MacBook Air's trackpad offers some functionality that we haven't seen before on a MacBook.

As displayed in a redesigned Keyboard & Mouse preference pane via a series of informative animations, the MacBook Air supports new gestures that go way beyond the two-finger scroll and secondary click. In a move that will be familiar to iPhone users, the MacBook Air's trackpad understands the same pinch-and-spread finger movement that you use to zoom images and Web pages on the iPhone.

On the MacBook Air, what that gesture does depends on what program you're currently using. It'll zoom in or out on an image in Preview or iPhoto, but when your cursor is over an Finder window set to Icon view, it has the odd effect of changing the size of all of the icons.

A similar two-finger gesture, taking two fingers and circling them around one another, cues iPhoto and Preview to rotate the selected image. (Other programs should be able to take advantage of these gestures as well, and presumably other future MacBook models will include this capability.)

A three-finger swipe across the trackpad kicks off another action that will be familiar to iPhone users: it advances (or backs up) within a list of items. In iPhoto, swiping to the right will advance to the next image; in Safari, swiping to the left is akin to clicking the Back button.

But the iPhone's swipe gesture takes a single finger, while for obvious reasons the MacBook Air's trackpad reserves single-finger movement for the act of moving your cursor around the screen. I found swiping with the required three fingers to be ungainly at best. While I can see myself adopting these new two-finger gestures just as I have the two-finger scroll and the two-finger right-click, I have my doubts about the three-finger swipe.