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Apple brings inertial scrolling, three-finger drag to some MacBooks

Apple on Tuesday issued an update to a number of recent notebooks — including the MacBook, MacBook Pro, and MacBook Air — bringing inertial scrolling and three-finger drag gesture support to some trackpads.

Magic Trackpad and Multi-Touch Trackpad Update 1.0 was released Tuesday afternoon by Apple. It is a 75.09MB update that requires Mac OS X 10.6.4. In addition to adding inertial scrolling and three-finger drag in recent MacBook and MacBook Pro notebooks, it also adds support for Apple's newly released $69 Magic Trackpad.

According to Apple, the following MacBook and MacBook Pro models now have both inertial scrolling and three-finger drag gesture:

MacBook (13-inch, Early 2009)

MacBook (13-inch, Mid 2009)

MacBook (13-inch, Late 2009)

MacBook (13-inch, Aluminum, Late 2008)

MacBook Pro (17-inch, Mid 2010)

MacBook Pro (15-inch, Mid 2010)

MacBook Pro (17-inch, Mid 2009)

MacBook Pro (15-inch, 2.53 GHz, Mid 2009)

MacBook Pro (15-inch, Mid 2009)

MacBook Pro (13-inch, Mid 2009)

MacBook Pro (17-inch, Early 2009)

MacBook Pro (17-inch, Late 2008)

Inertial scrolling, but not the three-finger gesture, is offered in four additional models:

MacBook Air

MacBook Air (Mid 2009)

MacBook Pro (15-inch, Early 2008)

MacBook Pro (17-inch, Early 2008)

The new three-finger gesture was first discovered earlier Tuesday with hands-on tests of the Magic Trackpad. The capability allows users to quickly drag windows around. At the time, the feature was exclusive to the new hardware.

Also Tuesday, Apple released updates for Windows that add support for the Magic Trackpad hardware. A 6.62MB update is available for 32-bit flavors of Windows, while the 64-bit software is 3.98MB. It works with Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7 machines, as well as Macs running the operating system via Boot Camp.