Okay, the honeymoon's over-- we've had this new PowerBook for a week, now, and we've recovered sufficiently from the Blissed-Out Daze of New Macdom to say this straight out: while we totally love the speed, the screen, and just about everything else about this svelte hunka-hunka burnin' aluminum, the new trackpad is, to be brutally frank, annoying the living bejeezus out of us. Not the two-finger scrolling thing, which, as it turns out, is pure genius; we're not at all partial to using a scrollwheel on a mouse, which feels somehow hokey and unnatural to us, but simply using two fingers on a trackpad instead of one to scroll a window vertically and/or horizontally, well, that single ridiculously useful and intuitive feature alone was practically worth the price of the whole PowerBook.

Or, rather, it would have been, if the trackpad weren't so flawed in other far more vital ways. For one thing, even on the fastest setting, the tracking feels slower than crosstown traffic on Parade Day. And on our unit, at least, the trackpad button is irksomely stiff and mushy; it doesn't so much "click" as "smoosh." That wouldn't be much of an annoyance if we could rely on tapping the pad itself to click, but getting taps to register is unforgivably hit-and-miss, and for some reason, when using tap-to-click, the old double-click-and-drag maneuver to select a block of words (which we use constantly-- seriously, we really do) doesn't actually work at all. It worked on the Pismo, and probably on all PowerBooks made in at least the past five or six years... with the notable exception of the brand-spankin'-newest models with the scrolling trackpad, which means we have to punt and use the overly-stiff-'n'-smooshy hardware button quite a lot, and our wrists aren't pleased.

And yet, we seem to be among the lucky ones, because other peoples' trackpads are reportedly misbehaving in far more serious ways: faithful viewer Paul tipped us off to a rash of "new trackpad" complaints at MacInTouch (by way of AppleInsider) which claim that several units are "failing to respond at all for short periods of time," and even delivering static electric shocks. While we've yet to be zapped, we have noticed that, in some situations, we have to drag our fingers across the trackpad back and forth a few times before the cursor even budges. That can't be good.

The good news is that, as faithful viewer Glen Malaspina points out, Apple has officially acknowledged that all is not right in Trackpadville. Sure, all it's done as yet is post a technote admitting that the cursor on new PowerBooks might "temporarily stop tracking" and that "Apple is aware of this issue and is investigating," but that's a start. So far the only workarounds listed are to make sure you're only using one finger (duh) and to reset a stuck trackpad by placing an "entire palm directly onto the whole trackpad for 3 to 4 seconds" and then removing it "in one smooth motion." Sounds like voodoo to us, but hey, it's slightly less trouble than anything involving freshly-spilled chicken blood, so we'll take it.

None of this is to say that the new PowerBooks aren't the bomb anyway; the trackpad annoyances, for us, at least, haven't been a show-stopper, and the other features more than make up for the bother. Like being able to make the keyboard light up by covering up the speaker grilles, for example. You can't beat that for entertainment value. Ooooh, glowy.