Mac Life and
Gizmodo are both reporting that Snow Leopard will add multi-touch gestures to all older MacBooks and MacBook Pros. This has gotten a lot of people's hopes up that three- and four-finger multi-touch gestures will be back-ported to all Apple portables that previously did not have them.
Unfortunately, this is incorrect. Apples own information on
Snow Leopard's enhancements reads, "All Mac notebooks
with Multi-Touch trackpads now support three- and four-finger gestures." (emphasis added)
This raises the question, what's the difference between a multi-touch trackpad and a regular one, and which models have it?
The multi-touch trackpad was introduced with the first MacBook Air in early 2008. Not only does it allow two-finger scrolling like older models, it also allows advanced three-finger gestures like swiping to go back in Safari.
One month later, the early 2008 MacBook Pro
received the same trackpad, with the same gestures. The multi-touch trackpad gains this new functionality because it has an embedded controller chip, identical to the one in the iPhone and iPod Touch, which allows advanced input from more than two fingers at once.
Later, the unibody MacBooks and MacBook Pros debuted with multi-touch trackpads, but also introduced new
four-finger gestures, which will not be officially supported in the older MacBook Airs and MacBook Pros until Snow Leopard's release.
The original MacBook Air and early 2008 MacBook Pro are the
only machines which will gain additional gestures via Snow Leopard. The only reason these notebook models are able to gain these gestures via software updates, while earlier MacBook Pros and all plastic MacBooks are not, is because they possess the multi-touch controller chip in their trackpads.
Just to break it down, this is a list of the only, and I mean
only, notebooks that support multi-touch gestures, either now or after Snow Leopard:
MacBook Air (all models)
Early 2008 MacBook Pro
Late 2008 17" MacBook Pro
Unibody MacBook (all models)
Unibody MacBook Pro (all models)
If you have a MacBook Pro manufactured before early 2008 or any plastic MacBook, then Snow Leopard or not, multi-touch isn't coming your way...