The Force Touch feature of the new trackpad allows you to press ‘deeper’, giving you additional levels of tapping feedback.
This can give you the feel of a ‘clickable’ surface or even depth. This feedback relies on phenomenon called lateral force fields (LFFs), which can cause humans to experience vibrations as haptic ‘textures’. This feedback fools your finger into believing that you’ve pressed down on a hinged button, the way your current trackpad works. There is a set of vibrating motors underneath that provides ‘force feedback’, also known as haptics in some applications. There is an audible ‘click’ sound (that’s what the silly picture below is, me listening) and it does in fact feel like it clicks, but that is merely an illusion. When you ‘click’ it, it ‘clicks’, but it doesn’t actually click. But I did an informal poll and a lot of folks did not, so I thought I’d mention it. If you’ve been scouring the coverage of Apple’s new MacBook, you’ll probably already know this.
