Here’s how the iPad’s new trackpad actually works

Apple made it official: trackpad and mouse support is coming to the iPad. You can get it on an iPad Pro by spending $299 or $349 on Apple’s new Magic Keyboard, get it on a regular iPad with Logitech’s $150 keyboard case, use your existing Bluetooth mouse or trackpad, or presumably use any number of forthcoming accessories. So the mouse support is there, but how will it work? The iPad and iPadOS are touch-based operating systems meant to be used with your big fat fingers, not tiny little pointers.

Even when the Apple Pencil was introduced, they have stayed that way. Plus, more recently, iPadOS has increased the level of complexity for multitasking to 11 with support for multiple windows, split screens, slide-over windows, custom gestures for text editing, and more. Adding another input method to that mix could result in chaos. We can answer some of your questions about how trackpad support will work today and we’ll get a chance to actually use it ourselves in the public beta.

In the meantime, here’s what we definitely know about how it will work based on videos Apple has released publicly and on a video presentation given to reporters this morning. Here, it makes sense when you look at it in this slowed-down gif of Apple’s hype video: Plus, now that the developer beta is out, we’re seeing support works for other things you might need, like hovering on elements in webpages: WebKit on iPadOS now supports hover/mouseover for web pages as you might expect That’s a lot of gestures to remember, but no more than exist on the Mac. It seems overwhelming, but if you made a similar list for your MacBook or Windows machine, it would be just as intimidating. The iPad’s gestures are just different.

Here, let Apple’s software boss Craig Federighi walk you through it all in this video. How will all of this actually feel in practice? We’ll know soon enough. The iPad’s UI is powerful, but in many ways it’s difficult to learn, in part because so many of us still have desktop UI paradigms in our heads.

One interesting thing you can’t do is just have a bunch of traditional windows like you’re used to having on a desktop or even a Windows tablet. Apple is sticking to its guns on its attempt to rethink how we move and rearrange windows on the iPad screen, with stuff like split screen and Slide Over. For better or worse (and I think for the better), the new trackpad features don’t turn the iPad into a Mac. Whether any of that radically changes this year with iPadOS 14 is anybody’s guess.