Apple’s Magic Trackpad Now Available For $69

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The Apple Store is back up following some downtime this morning and the Magic Trackpad is now available.

At just $69, the Magic Trackpad provides your desktop Mac with all of the multi-touch functionality and gestures you’ll find on your Mac notebook. It looks fantastic and uses the same sculpted aluminum design as Apple’s wireless keyboard, so it will blend in perfectly on your desk.

The main gestures will be very familiar to those of you who have used one of Apple’s recent multi-touch notebooks:

  • Click: Press down on the glass surface to physically click and double-click. Soft “tap-to-click” can be enabled within System Preferences.
  • Scroll: Use two fingers to scroll vertically, horizontally and diagonally, making browsing websites or reading PDFs a breeze.
  • Swipe: Use three fingers to navigate back and forth between websites in your browser or whilst flicking through photos in iPhoto.
  • Rotate: Using your thumb and forefinger to twist clockwise or counter-clockwise, you can rotate images in a flash.

It’s great to see multi-touch functionality finally make it to desktop Macs and it’ll be exciting to see what other exciting functions the Magic Trackpad will throw up over time. It’s worth noting, however, that if you already have a Magic Mouse, many of the multi-touch and swipe gestures above can be used on your desktop already with free third-party software like MagicPrefs.

Magic Trackpad connects to your Mac via bluetooth, so obviously you’ll need a bluetooth enabled Mac and you’ll also need to be running Mac OS X Snow Leopard v10.6.4. It’s shipping now, so for more information and pictures of Apple’s latest creation, check out the Magic Trackpad page of Apple’s website.

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