A closer look at Apple's new MacBook Force Touch pressure-sensitive trackpad
What you can do with the new MacBook's Force Touch trackpad — Apple announced a new MacBook model that features an entirely new trackpad design. Learn what tricks hide below its surface.
Context & Ripple Effects
With the new MacBook, Apple replaced the mechanical click of its trackpad with Force Touch, a pressure-sensitive surface paired with haptic feedback — the machine registers how hard you press rather than whether the pad physically depresses. The move landed alongside a thinner chassis that critics flagged for trading away keyboard depth, with Marco.org calling out major usability compromises made in the name of thinness.
What makes this more than a laptop spec is where it points: within months, sources described Force Touch reaching the iPhone 6S in a different form than on Watch or MacBook, tied to a stylus for the upcoming 12.9-inch iPad, while startup Sensei countered with its own 20,000-sensor pressure trackpad. The MacBook is the first shipping proof that pressure input is becoming a platform-level interface layer, not a one-off feature.
First-order effects
- MacBook buyers lose the physical click entirely — every 'press' is simulated by haptics — and macOS developers gain a new pressure dimension to build interactions around on laptops.
Second-order effects
- Pressure input propagates across Apple's device line: reporting has Force Touch arriving on the iPhone 6S as a distinct three-level '3D Touch' implementation and working with the 12.9-inch iPad's stylus, forcing app developers to design for multiple pressure schemes at once.
- Third-party hardware makers respond directly — Sensei's Morph trackpad, with 20K sensors and function 'overlays,' positions itself as an independent answer to Apple's closed Force Touch approach.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds — MacBook first, then iPhone and iPad per the sourcing above — pressure becomes a default input layer across consumer computing, splitting the market between integrated vendor implementations like Apple's and open sensor platforms like Sensei's, while critics' usability objections set the terms of debate about what thinness costs.
The trend: Interfaces are shifting from purely visual to tactile: pressure-sensitive, haptic surfaces are moving from a single MacBook experiment toward a cross-device standard spanning Apple's lineup and independent hardware rivals.