I just bought the Apple Magic Trackpad 2 in 2022, a 7 year old product. Why? Justifications aside, because I can; also cause someone was setting it 2nd hand (2 months old) at 35% discount ヽ(´▽`)/
I’ve always been curious (for the past 4 years) about using a trackpad in a desktop setting, the gesture controls just seems like a nice thing to have.
What I like about it ❤️
- Navigation
- Extremely useful for moving around in large diagrams: something I do quite often in my job
- Very useful for excel sheets
- Web browsing with gestures is awesome, especially the 2 finger swipe to go back to previous page
- 2 finger double tap zoom to fill screen
- 3 finger drag (enabled in accessibility): less fatigue on my finger since I don’t have to click and hold
- moving windows
- highlighting text
- moving browser tabs
- moving files
- basically anything that needs click and hold
- battery life seems pretty good; should be able to last a month per charge
- works flawlessly with universal control (what’s this?)
What I don’t like about it 💔
- Scrolling long pages/documents, more actions needed: too used to the freewheel scrolling features on MX Master 3
- not as comfortable; still figuring out the ergonomics
- no middle-click? what the f?
- there are apps that can replicate this behaviour but they are paid 🤮
Conclusion 📕
Would I recommend it? Well… no. I’m not against it, but unless you’re very clear what you want to use it for, there really isn’t a strong use case for it. It’s definitely a nice-to-have gadget if you do see it on a huge discount!
Some people have complained that it’s not as accurate as a mouse for daily tasks, I didn’t face any issues. I will be using it as my primary pointer device and see how it goes. When I get a bigger desk, I believe I would switch to a mouse + trackpad combo and use whichever makes sense for the task at hand.