A few days after the announcement of Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, we commented here on the MacMagazine information fromMac | Life about gesture support multi-touch on older Apple notebooks in the new system. The news seemed to cover even white MacBooks, manufactured a while ago, but apparently they are not included among the laptops that will receive the feature, as Apple explains in more detail on another page of its website that lists all the refinements that are yet to come and were also commented on today by TUAW.
Apparently, the novelty comes only for the older MacBooks Pro and Air, but no polycarbonate MacBook fits this list (nor the newer model), as it is reported that the controller of your trackpad does not appear to have the same gesture capabilities of others. With the exception of this, all Apple notebooks manufactured in the past 18 months are capable of recognizing multi-touch on trackpads and will have all the features released by Apple until today, when upgraded to Snow Leopard.
While Mac OS X 10.6 does not reach end users, it is strange to think that MacBooks Pro launched in early 2008 and MacBooks Air have the same trackpad capabilities as newer models (with aluminum monoblock housing), but no have received support for all gestures to date. However, there is a hack able to enable all of these functions on them, since Mac OS X 10.5.6 was released. The article itself TUAW explains how users should proceed to achieve this goal, but how it involves replacing system files (which is theoretically not recommended) and repairing permissions, just proceed at your own risk.
