This is definitely one of the less necessary upgrades I’ve made to my desk setup. When I upgraded to the black Apple Magic Keyboard with Touch ID and Numeric Keypad (just rolls off the tongue) in 2024, I considered living with the inconsistencies between it and my old Magic Trackpad in size, color and border radius, but I didn’t consider it for very long. Besides the switch to USB C (which I did appreciate), there wasn’t any real functional difference between my old Magic Trackpad and the new one I replaced it with. It was close to ten years old, so it had some miles on it.
I think my first encounter with an external trackpad was at my first full-time web design job, back in 2015. I soon decided that having access to the gestures from the MacBook Pro trackpad while using an external monitor at my desk was the first thing ever, and I soon replaced the oft-derided Magic Mouse with a Magic Trackpad of my own. During my brief ownership of a gaming PC during the pandemic, I was shocked by how strange it felt to use a regular computer mouse again.
