The release of OSX Lion is a few weeks away give or take a few and as it approaches a thought occurs: How dependent upon the Magic Trackpad is Lion? Whilst driving the interface with a mouse is quite possible, to take advantage of the system-wide gestures you will need a Magic Trackpad. Every new iMac since May this year has shipped with a choice of Magic Mouse of Magic Trackpad bundled and naturally all portable Macs (Macbooks, MacBook Pros, MacBook Airs) have a multi-touch trackpad built into them.  Also around that time, Apple in Australia at least, adjusted down the pricing of their peripherals to a more reasonable $75 AUD from $99 AUD since their release in July 2010. Ideally Apple would already have a Magic Trackpad on every desktop where a Mac Pro or iMac was in use. The reality is that the people who upgrade from Leopard, or Snow Leopard to Lion and currently use an iMac or Mac Pro are out of luck with the new gestures.

The simplest thing to do would be for Apple to offer a discount or a rebate with the proof of purchase (downloaded via the Mac App Store of course) of Lion for those upgrading to Lion and that have an iMac or Mac Pro. If your iMac or Mac Pro is registered with Apple this is straight-forward enough for Apple to do - but would mobile Mac upgraders feel left out? So long as it was a token amount it may be okay - alternatively Apple could offer it across the board for all types of Macs upgrading to Lion.

However they work it, it would seem to be a good move. Apple isn’t big on freebies generally unless bad press is about. Then again, if they really want to move their existing user base to Lion (and they really do) then this would be a big incentive for the fence-sitters out there. We’ll wait and see I suppose.