What Is Force Touch on Mac? Everything It Can Do
Every MacBook trackpad made since 2015 — and every Magic Trackpad from the Magic Trackpad 2 onward — senses how hard you press. Push past the normal click and you get a second, deeper click called a force click, which unlocks a layer of shortcuts most Mac owners never find: instant dictionary lookups, link previews, inline file renaming, and pressure-sensitive playback controls.
What Force Touch actually is
A Force Touch trackpad has no moving parts. The glass doesn't hinge downward like older trackpads did; pressure sensors measure how hard you're pressing, and a haptic engine vibrates to simulate the feel of a click. The proof: shut your Mac down and the trackpad stops "clicking" entirely, because the click was never mechanical in the first place.
Because it's all sensors, macOS can tell a normal click from a deeper press and treats the deep press as a separate input. You'll find it on the MacBook Pro (2015 and later), the 12-inch MacBook, the MacBook Air (2018 and later), and the Magic Trackpad 2 and newer. The Magic Mouse has a touch surface for gestures but no pressure sensing, so none of this applies to it.
How to force click
Click normally, then keep pressing until you feel a second, firmer thump under your finger. That second stage is the force click. If nothing happens, confirm it's enabled:
- Open System Settings → Trackpad.
- In the Point & Click tab, check that Force Click and haptic feedback is on.
- Make sure Look up & data detectors is set to Force Click with One Finger if you want the dictionary behavior described below.
The path is identical on macOS 13 Ventura, 14 Sonoma, and 15 Sequoia.
Everything a force click can do
- Look up a word — force click any word to get a popover with dictionary, thesaurus, and Wikipedia results. Works in Safari, Mail, Notes, Pages, and most native apps.
- Preview a link — force click a link in Safari or Mail and the destination page renders in a floating preview, no tab opened.
- Rename a file — force click a file's name in Finder or on the desktop and it flips straight into edit mode.
- Quick Look a file — force click a file's icon for a Quick Look preview, same as pressing Space.
- Preview an address — force click a street address in Mail or Safari to see it pinned on a Maps preview.
- Act on dates and flight numbers — force click a date to create a Calendar event, or a tracking/flight number to preview its status.
- App Exposé from the Dock — force click a running app's Dock icon to fan out all of that app's windows.
Pressure sensitivity beyond the click
A few apps use the trackpad's full pressure range, not just the two click stages. In QuickTime Player and iMovie, the fast-forward and rewind buttons are pressure-sensitive — press harder to accelerate the scrub speed. In Maps, the zoom buttons respond the same way. And in Markup (Preview's toolbar or a Quick Look annotation), signing your name or drawing with a finger varies the stroke weight with pressure.
None of these are essential, which is exactly why Apple never surfaces them. But the rename and Look up gestures alone are worth retraining your finger for — they remove a right-click-and-menu round trip you make dozens of times a day.
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If you keep triggering it by accident
The most common Force Touch complaint is the opposite of discovery: dictionary popovers appearing mid-drag because you pressed a little too hard. You can fix that without losing the feature — raise the click firmness to Firm so a force click takes real intent, or turn the deep press off entirely. See how to turn off Force click on Mac for the trade-offs.