Apple’s launch of a new display, iMacs and a much beefed up Mac Pro might have grabbed the headlines, but we must confess to being most intrigued by the company’s release of what it calls the Magic Trackpad. Quite simply, it looks just like the trackpad you see on a notebook, only it is a separate piece of hardware that connects to your computer using Bluetooth and well, then behaves exactly like a trackpad on one of Apple’s notebooks does (it’s even made of the same stuff - “same advanced touch-friendly and wear-resistant glass surface,” to quote them Cupertino fellas). You can swipe your way through pictures, scroll up and down using intertia scrolling, and of course, use the famed multi-touch pinch-to-zoom that the iPhone made so famous!
So you might say, what is so special? Nothing much if you use a notebook, but if you are using a desktop, we think this beats the pants off a conventional mouse. And heck, it is built of the same aluminum material that is used for Apple’s wireless keyboard and is of the same angle and height, making it a real sight for eyes that are sore and otherwise! Even if you do have a notebook, this would not be a bad idea, considering that it offer 80 per cent more area than the trackpads found on Mac notebooks. Well worth $69, say we! We are waiting for it to come to India already.
It is small and light enough to be carried one-handed, looks terrific and still manages to pack in enough computing muscle to embarrass a number of computers in the market today. We are talking of the latest version of the Mac mini, Apple’s incredibly compact computer, which was launched a few hours ago. It is little over half a foot in length and width (19.7 cm), stands a mere 3.6 cm tall, and tips the scales at an ultraportable 1.36 kg - all in a beautifully crafted aluminum frame. And within it lies a Core 2 Duo 2.4 GHz processor, 2GB RAM, a 320 GB HDD, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and a NVIDIA GeForce 320M graphics processor. All for a price in the vicinity of Rs 44,900. There is a new HDMI port, an SD card slot and considerably improved graphics, thanks to the 48-core processing power of the NVIDIA GeForce 320M (it is not still cutting-edge enough for high-end games but handy enough for most graphics tasks). One thing that is missing is the power adapter, thanks to a new integrated power supply.
