Apple’s 2015 MacBook and 13-inch Retina MacBook Pro are both equipped with a new Force Touch trackpad that adds new features within certain apps on OS X. If you’re not familiar with Apple’s new Force Touch trackpad, it’s completely pressure sensitive and can detect a hard press from a soft press. With this, you now have the ability to Force Click (a click with a continued press) on specific items to perform different actions.
We’ve spent the last 24 hours searching through OS X on Apple’s new 13-inch MacBook Pro with Retina Display to find all of the hidden Force Click features that Apple has yet to mention. There are a good amount of uses for Force Click, but these 15 happen to be our favorite…
If you’d like to find out more about the functionality or technology behind the new Force Touch trackpad, click here. Also, for our full unboxing and overview of the 13-inch MacBook Pro (2015) check out this article. Apple has also documented a few of these features on the 12-inch MacBook design site, but many of them are simply discovered by Force Clicking on items within OS X.
In the future, Apple’s Force Click feature will be customizable within various 3rd-party apps through the new Force Touch API implemented within OS X 10.10.3. This will allows the developers of your favorite apps to enable Force Click gestures to perform various actions with the current generation 12-inch and 13-inch MacBooks.
Check out our top 15 hidden Force Click features video below:
[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f0wX9m2E0Ik]
Here are the 15 force click features we’ve found within OS X. To see them in action, watch the above video.
- Rename any label
- Preview any file
- Preview Calendar dates
- Click on any date to create an event
- Drop a pin in Maps
- Pressure sensitive zoom in Maps
- Lookup the definition of any word
- pressure sensitive fast forward
- Show all windows from an open app
- Right click on certain dock icons
- Edit contact details
- Add a contact with number or email address
- Preview any link (Safari only)
- Show Do Not Disturb options in Messages
- Pressure sensitive drawing
Check out the video to seem them all in action. If you’ve discovered any new Force Click features we’ve left out, drop a comment below and let us know. My personal favorite is the Safari link preview that allows you to view any website without actually launching a browser.
What are your favorite Force Touch/Click features? Do you think this is a useful feature for MacBooks?
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You guys are fast!
How is force click different from clicking (not tapping) on the old style track pads? I don’t see why this functionality can’t be applied to clicks on current MacBooks.
Just realized my question is stupid – you’d not be able to click & drag.
Its actually very interesting, I went from an early 2014 air base model, to a 13″ pro 2.9 gHz, i7, 16 gb ram, not only is the computer faster, but the force touch helps for previewing links, photoshop use, and all over OS X like previewing files, and sweeping through videos, defiantly isn’t worth upgrading from a mid 2014 pro to get the early 2015 pro. The reason I got the pro was for photoshop and editing for my youtube, and photography business.
“Hidden”?? weren’t at least half of these shown during the keynote??
Clickbait title, but useful video. I’m torn as to how I feel about this.. :)
Very cool
I want a imac standalone trackpad and a magic mouse with force click!
I was thinking the same thing! I have a trackpad but I barely use it. I would, however, love a new Force Click trackpad. Hopefully they’ll announce one soon.
Yes! Magic mouse would be perfect for me…
And ipad and iphone
That safari feature omg….I want it but not getting a new laptop for that.
It’s like HoverZoom but for ENTIRE WEBSITES! AMAZING!
use 3 fingers and click instead of “force click” on older macbooks, works for almost all shown tricks
Whew! Had to stop the video halfway through due to annoyance. :-)
I don’t think they have really thought this force click thing through very well. At times it takes the place of what was previously a tap on the trackpad, at other times a click. Sometimes it replaces the spacebar, and sometimes it replaces the enter key. other times it replaces a gesture like a three finger tap etc.
It’s just all over the place, “breaking” everything. They are going to need to re-do all the keyboard shortcuts, taps and gestures now to give some kind of overall order to everything. In the meantime (next several years) no one will know what does what.
Yea, I agree with that. The cool stuff is going to be using the variable pressure to change things that are… variable. Like the zooming in maps and fast forward in quicktime. That seems straight forward and intuitive.
Well, if you don’t like it you can always disable it.
Eh. (shrugs) I don’t use laptops. I don’t see the utility if you also already have a desktop. I was just pointing out the logical inconsistency of what they did here.
Are you just trolling us? It just took all those functions AND MADE THEM CONSISTENT.
Doing EVERYTHING with Force Touch makes 1000x more sense than have 20 different keyboard shortcuts and functions.
It took a system that was broken, hard to memorize, and difficult for casual computer users and made it as simple as just using Force Touch.
They don’t need to redo anything and I am 100% certain that all existing shortcuts have been left intact. It’s not like they took away the ability to hit spacebar to preview an image.
So you are just wrong. Don’t be a hater just because it is a new way of doing something.
Exactly, this streamlines all different gestures and shortcuts. And for power users who are too used to using old shortcuts, they are still there :)
Gestures are related to real situations… I don’t think that Force touch is bad, in some cases just weak, but for a company like Apple maybe is not the kind of innovation that we are used to see.
(sorry for my english, i hope you get the idea)
It’s weird that it just replaces three finger taps in several cases. I feel like that gesture wasn’t really slow or hard to do. In some cases I think the light three finger tap makes more sense as means to preview things than hard pressing on something which I would assume would open it like it does with spring loaded folders.
Force click as a trigger for a gesture doesn’t make that much sense to me but I guess I haven’t used it. The cool stuff is the pressure variability. Like zooming in faster or scrubbing faster. That’s actually intuitive and I can’t wait for that to come to ios devices.
Says the man that has all of his fingers…..some people don’t….This method of interaction is more universally acceptable.
Says the man who doesn’t have carpal tunnel syndrome making “force click” painful. Lesson? Give people the choice rather than arbitrarily switching out features from under them.
The following features works since many time (about 4 or 5 years, when I started using OS X Snow Leopard):
Drop a pin in Maps
Right click on certain dock icons
To activate these features, you only have to click and hold with the trackpad or magic mouse.
I’m getting a Mac Book Pro soon. Macs are lovely,
Show all windows? Just use 4 fingers gestures.
New ways to do the same, i don’t know, it looks cool… but.
I would use about 1/3 of these 15 options.
I don’t understand why they didn’t give the 15″ MBP this new track pad. I get they are holding off on the processor upgrade but not this. I just bought a 15″MBP because it was upgrade time, didn’t want the 13″.
Very helpful, Thanks!
This makes things a lot better if you previously tapped to click. It’s going to take a while until I get around to replacing any laptop though, but I look forward to it.
You can’t Lookup in Pages. So inconsistent.
I thought it was nothing more than an expensive gimmick when I first heard about this; almost everything can be accomplished with a 3-finger click or a combination of a click and modifier keys. But after using one tonight, I’m finding that it’s surprisingly useful. Me being used to doing almost all of the above with 3-fingers and/or modifiers, I was first surprised how much quicker it is to be able to do it all one-handed. The pressure-sensative scrubbing even works in iTunes, which is something I’ve wanted to be able to do for a long time (like you can on iOS).
Question: when dragging files, say to a dock icon or another collapsed folder or tab, it usually takes a few seconds to open your target. Is there a key that does this without force touch?
I actually think there’s something to this idea.
Couldn’t watch more than about 30 seconds of the video! The narrator is talking too fast and the background Muzak is distracting. In the future, please slow down your narration (even stop for a breath!) and definitely get rid of the background track or give the users an option to mute it.
Someone needs to write an article about the *downsides* of Force Touch! It makes simple drag-and-drop (text, files, folders) much harder to accomplish. The computer often doesn’t register the drag action. Very frustrating– it’s as if the trackpad has ceased working. Changing firmness settings didn’t solve this. Then, adding insult to injury, the press harder feature goes South every now and then. There have many reports of the definition look up failing. (I’ve experienced it multiple times.). The look up function is still there–it’ll happen if you switch from FT to 3- finger taps, but the Force Touch is no longer operational. The magic of Force Touch, therefore, doesn’t always work!
I know, I know. I’m complaining– the food was bad, and the portions were so small! I’ve turned it off.