When Apple was speculated to be going the multi-button mouse route last year (which eventually culminated in the uber-configurable Mighty Mouse), I was thinking about the impact on Macintosh notebook design:

I wonder how this would affect future Powerbook development; they’ll have to start being built with two (or more) click buttons.

Of course, the Powerbooks are now passe, supplanted by the new Intel-powered MacBooks. And the new generation of Apple notebooks took care of the alterna-click option — without adding an extra button:

The MacBook adds something new: if you touch the [trackpad] with two fingers and then click the clicker, you produce what, on a Windows machine, would be a right-click of the mouse. Cool.

Cool indeed. Apple figured out how to accomodate contextual clicking without spooking its established user base (which seems to have an irrational fear of extra buttons). An elegant solution, as we’ve gotten accustomed to seeing from Cupertino.

I do wonder about how reliable the two-finger maneuver is, though. I don’t object to a different digit-shuffle to achieve the contextual-menu effect. But how sensitive is the trackpad in detecting finger width? Suppose you’re an individual with larger-than-average hands/fingers — are you going to be cursing non-stop at your MacBook because it continually thinks you’re attempting the right-click effect? Hopefully, it’s a configurable function.

UPDATE, 6/4/2006: I did finally drop into the Apple Store to briefly testdrive one of these MacBooks. The two-finger move does work well enough. However, it’s not a default setting — you have to dig into the mouse/trackpad settings and turn on this user behavior (it took me a while to figure this out). That’s crucial, because features that aren’t automatically turned on tend to not be utilized by the majority of the user base. I guess the two-finger slide will become something of an insider’s trick.