New mac trackpad. What is Force Touch: exploring the “deception of touch” in new Apple laptops
Fair, not overpriced and not underestimated. There should be prices on the Service website. Necessarily! without asterisks, clear and detailed, where technically possible - as accurate and concise as possible.
If spare parts are available, up to 85% of complex repairs can be completed in 1-2 days. Modular repairs require much less time. The website shows the approximate duration of any repair.
Warranty and responsibility
A guarantee must be given for any repairs. Everything is described on the website and in the documents. The guarantee is self-confidence and respect for you. A 3-6 month warranty is good and sufficient. It is needed to check quality and hidden defects that cannot be detected immediately. You see honest and realistic terms (not 3 years), you can be sure that they will help you.
Half the success in Apple repair is the quality and reliability of spare parts, so a good service works directly with suppliers, there are always several reliable channels and your own warehouse with proven spare parts for current models, so you don’t have to waste extra time.
Free diagnostics
This is very important and has already become a rule of good manners for the service center. Diagnostics is the most difficult and important part of the repair, but you don't have to pay a penny for it, even if you don't repair the device based on its results.
Service repairs and delivery
A good service values your time, so it offers free delivery. And for the same reason, repairs are carried out only in the workshop of a service center: they can be done correctly and according to technology only in a prepared place.
Convenient schedule
If the Service works for you, and not for itself, then it is always open! absolutely. The schedule should be convenient to fit in before and after work. Good service works on weekends and holidays. We are waiting for you and working on your devices every day: 9:00 - 21:00
The reputation of professionals consists of several points
Company age and experience
Reliable and experienced service has been known for a long time.
If a company has been on the market for many years and has managed to establish itself as an expert, people turn to it, write about it, and recommend it. We know what we are talking about, since 98% of incoming devices in the service center are restored.
Other service centers trust us and refer complex cases to us.
How many masters in areas
If there are always several engineers waiting for you for each type of equipment, you can be sure:
1. there will be no queue (or it will be minimal) - your device will be taken care of right away.
2. you give your Macbook for repair to an expert in the field of Mac repairs. He knows all the secrets of these devices
Technical literacy
If you ask a question, a specialist should answer it as accurately as possible.
So that you can imagine what exactly you need.
They will try to solve the problem. In most cases, from the description you can understand what happened and how to fix the problem.
MacBook owners are probably well acquainted with numerous gestures that greatly facilitate interaction with the laptop. However, not everyone knows how to open the Preview function, Notification Center or Exposè. Here are 10 multi-touch gestures that can save time and make your MacBook easier to use.
Open and close Notification Center with two-finger swipe
Launchpad
Launchpad helps you find, organize, and easily launch programs on your MacBook. You can start the mode by pressing your thumb and three other fingers together. This gesture requires a little skill, but once you master it, opening Launchpad will become much easier.
Show desktop
To bring up the desktop, you need to place your thumb and three other fingers on the trackpad and spread them apart. This is the most convenient way to access files saved on your desktop while you work.
Show Mission Control
Swiping up with three fingers (some MacBook models use four fingers) launches Mission Control, which lets you quickly view all open windows and spaces on your desktop. This feature is very convenient when working on laptops with small screens, as it provides an easy way to see what applications are currently open.
Show all windows of the current application
If you want to see a list of all the open windows in the current app while you're working, swipe down with three fingers on the trackpad (some MacBook models use four fingers). This action will call the Exposè function, which makes it easier to navigate among windows and applications.
Switch between desktops
Users with multiple desktops can easily switch between them by swiping left or right with three fingers (or four on some MacBook models).
Navigate between pages in the browser, Calendar, or QuickTime
Swiping horizontally with two fingers left or right on the trackpad when working in the browser allows you to go to the next page or return to the previous one. This gesture also works in a number of other applications. For example, in Calendar you can switch between days or months this way, and in QuickTime you can fast forward or rewind a video.
One of the innovations introduced at the beginning of March was the Force Touch trackpad with haptic response technology and supporting “press pressure”. Similar trackpads are also used in the new MacBook Pro 13" models with a Retina display. Vesti.Hi-tech examined the features of the new product.
“Force click” lets you, for example, quickly view definitions of words on pages opened in Safari or in a message in Mail
Press harder
Other improvements to the new MacBook Pro 13" are written in the second part of the review, but we will start with the main thing - absolutely the same in appearance and completely new inside the trackpad. The Force Touch trackpad does not click like its predecessor, but only pretends to. If you click on it , when the computer is turned off, nothing will happen - the glass panel with a capacitive sensor on the surface will simply move down a little under your finger. A little more noticeably if you do this at the edge, and almost imperceptibly if you press in the middle.
Pressure sensors are located in the corners of the trackpad panel - they record not only the fact of pressing, but also its force. At first, when pressing, the user feels a quite reliable (albeit less strong than on previous generation mechanical trackpads) click. A module called Taptic Engine is responsible for the “click” of the new trackpad - a small vibration motor that can quite reliably simulate tactile (and auditory - the sound is also quite “natural”) sensations by horizontal movement of the trackpad. Similar technology is used in the Apple Watch, and, according to rumors, it may appear in the next generation iPhone.
If you put more pressure on the trackpad after the first “click,” it will click again—that’s what Apple calls “Force Touch.” Such a click allows, with support in the software, to implement a lot of convenient functions. In this case, the force that needs to be applied for the first and second clicks is adjusted:
The default “medium” setting subjectively requires less force than clicking on the “old” mechanical trackpad of Apple computers
What is it for?
Thanks to Force Touch technology, the trackpad seems to have a new dimension - if not the whole, then half of it is definitely 2.5D. There are a lot of tasks in applications that will become easier and faster to perform if you “hang” them on a “deep click”. The next version of OS X Yosemite will feature an API for developers, so by the fall trackpads with Force Touch will probably be familiar to many third-party applications. In the meantime, here are the options for using “force click” available in current versions of OS X and Apple applications; most often, “deep click” replaces selecting one of the context menu items:
- Search for the definition of a word in the built-in system dictionary (Safari and Mail, when “pressed with force” a pop-up window appears with the definition).
- Preview web pages (by “force clicking” on a link in Safari or Mail).
- Display the address selected in Safari or Mail in the Maps application. In addition, in “Maps” you can create marks by pressing hard.
- Adding dates and events to the calendar.
- View detailed information: works in chat in “Messages” (“force click” on a conversation in the sidebar), in “Reminders” and “Calendar”.
- “Quick view” - “deep click” must be done on the file icon. The same action, but on the file name in Finder, will allow you to rename the file.
- In the Dock, you can display all open windows of a program by pressing firmly on its icon.
But that's not all. Some applications are able to recognize the degree of pressure more subtly, which makes interaction with them more convenient. Thus, by varying how hard you press the rewind or forward button, you can adjust the rewind speed in QuickTime or iMovie video player. And iMovie is the only application in the world so far (at least on mass commercial platforms and devices) that allows you to literally touch the interface with your fingers. So, when stretching a clip to its full length, the trackpad will gently vibrate to let you know when the end of the clip has been reached. And when adding titles, a tactile response can be felt when the titles “stick” to the beginning or end of the clip. A slight vibration also accompanies the guides that appear in the viewport as you trim clips.
Here it is, “the future as it is,” the only pity is that the innovations have so far been implemented only in one application. Either the Apple developers did not have enough time, or this is some kind of experiment, reconnaissance of the reaction of Mac owners to a new dimension in the user interface. In general, those who want to grumble always find a reason, but in the case of new trackpads you will have to strain to find such a reason - it is definitely no more difficult to control the new Mac than the old ones. Particularly pleasing is the ability to click with equal success on the farthest area of the panel closest to the keyboard. If the “artificial click” feels a little tactile, you can increase the required pressing force in the settings.
What's inside
On the well-known website iFixit, dedicated to repairing gadgets, the new MacBooks have already been dissected and photographs of the elements of the new trackpad have been put on public display. Here's what the trackpad panel looks like from below. The black parallelepiped, which is pryed from below with a special tool, is the Taptic Engine vibration motor:
And here's what's inside: four coils with ferromagnetic cores. There are several of them so that you can vary the strength and direction of vibration, creating different sensations for the user:
Of course, the Watch has a more compact version, but the technology is similar. The MacBook trackpad, which is pictured on Apple's website, looks a little different. Apparently, the different design is due to the limitations of the ultra-thin body.
And here’s what the four pressure sensors look like:
What else is new in the 2015 MacBook Pro 13" with Retina display? Of course, the processors are dual-core 5th generation Intel Core i5 and i7 (Broadwell architecture, 14 nm process technology). Standard configurations are offered with 2.7 GHz and 2.9 GHz options (TurboBoost increases the frequency to 3.1 or 3.3 GHz, respectively). An optional configuration with Intel Core i7 with a frequency of 3.1 GHz (Turbo Boost up to 3.4 GHz) is available for this chip as well. more third level cache - 4 MB.
The new base model 13" 2015 MacBook Pro scored 3,344 in our Geekbench 3.0 single-core benchmark and 7,074 in multi-core in our testing. The previous-generation base model, with a 2.6 GHz Haswell chip, scored around 3,000 and around 6,500, respectively. That is we can talk about about a 10% increase in performance as a result of the transition to the new fifth generation Intel Core.
And this laptop, for example, has a completely new flash drive made by Samsung, which provides twice the data transfer speed (useful if, for example, you edit 4K video, although this Mac is not entirely suitable for such resource-intensive exercises). The same SSDs are installed in the new MacBook Air, the standard capacity is 128 GB, in “advanced” configurations - 256 or 512 GB. The part looks like this (photo iFixit):
In addition, the new MacBook Pro has updated the batteries - slightly improved their chemistry, gaining about 4% in electrical capacity and (thanks to the new Intel Broadwell processors) about 10% in battery life. The parameters, according to iFixit, are as follows: voltage 11.42 volts, capacity 74.9 watt-hours. The manufacturer promises 10 hours of operation under medium loads or 12 hours of video playback in iTunes; the previous model had both figures an hour less.
Purchase
You can currently try new trackpads with Force Touch technology in a MacBook Pro with a 13" Retina display from early 2015; the computer can already be purchased in Russia. Prices for Macs in the official Apple store, which expectedly jumped amid the currency panic at the end of last year, are still refusing to follow the gradually recovering dollar and euro rates.
In the US, the base 13-inch Retina model has a price tag of $1,299. With a tax of 10% in most states, we get $1,429, or just over 81,000 rubles at the current exchange rate. In the official store, the price tag is almost 20,000 rubles higher - 99,990 rubles. Official Apple resellers, who are more flexible in responding to currency realities, have prices for such a computer starting at just over 90 thousand.
Increasing the capacity of the built-in storage device will cost 16,000 rubles (in the USA - the equivalent of 12,500 rubles), the “average” model costs 115,990 rubles in the official online store. A custom-configured laptop with 16 GB of RAM instead of 8 will cost the same 16,000 more. The top-end ready-made configuration with a 2.9 GHz Core i5 processor will cost 138,990 rubles at the time of writing this review, and a custom-made MacBook pumped to the maximum Pro with a 13" Retina display (Intel Core i7 3.1 GHz, 16 GB RAM, 1 TB SSD) costs 210,990 rubles.
Judging by the fact that Force Touch technology is being actively implemented in new Apple products (laptops, smart watches), the company is betting on it as one of the key ways to stay ahead of competitors in all market sectors. According to rumors, the screens of the new iPhones, which should be released in the fall, will provide a similar tactile response. In addition, an Apple patent application was recently published describing a virtual keyboard device - that is, an input device without keys that only simulates pressing them using tactile feedback. This technology will make laptops (or Bluetooth keyboards for Macs) even thinner.
The gesture system has not undergone any changes, there is no need to relearn it. But if you look at it all more broadly, then in most cases, a force click performs the same function that a three-finger tap previously performed.
Opinion site
With MacBook Air everything is clear. Once again, I would not recommend it as a replacement for the previous generation model. It's best thought of as Apple's first laptop because it's quite inexpensive (compared to the MacBook and MacBook Pro) and allows you to fully understand the application and service infrastructure. But the MacBook Pro with the new trackpad is a unique phenomenon. The compact 12-inch MacBook, on which Apple first demonstrated Force Touch, has not yet gone on sale, so the firmware became the first product with a new type of trackpad. So far there are not many scenarios for using forsklick, but it is already obvious that this is a great foundation for the future. Further use of new functions falls on the shoulders of third-party developers.
Victor
Recently I began to notice that the trackpad on the MacBook works somehow strangely. Somehow it “sticks”. What to do?
Greetings, Victor.
Even though MacBooks have some of the best trackpads on a laptop, they are also prone to sticking issues. Alas, often the problem is purely hardware and cannot be solved in software.
Of course, the first thing to do is make sure the trackpad is clean and free of grease. Use alcohol to degrease. This forced cleaning may return the trackpad to functionality.
Before contacting a service center (if your MacBook is no longer under warranty), you can try resetting PRAM, NVRAM, and the SMC controller yourself. Sometimes this really helps and the trackpad starts working properly. You can find instructions for resetting settings in.
If none of the points help, mentally prepare to repair the trackpad or replace the laptop battery. The fact is that over time, the MacBook battery increases slightly in size due to gradual wear and tear. This swelling of the battery causes the trackpad contacts to short out.
As a result, one of its sides gradually loses its characteristic click, and during operation a “sticking” effect occurs when you press one key, but two are triggered at once.
P.S.. On MacBook Pro models, it is better not to try to replace the trackpad yourself. There is a risk of damaging the tightly glued battery. Entrust this work to specialists.