Have you ever thought that your MacBook Pro or MacBook Air trackpad could be used as a precise digital weighing scale? Maybe, maybe not, but one enterprising developer thought of exactly that idea, and has built a fun little app that transforms your trackpad into an accurate scale.
This neat little apps functionality is achieved by tapping into the Force Touch pressure sensors that are part of all modern Mac laptop trackpads, and as the developer shows in a video (shown below), it’s precise!
Unfortunately the developer has not made a prebuilt Mac app binary or dmg available (yet anyway), so you’ll have to download the source and build it in Xcode yourself if you’re interested in trying out the TrackWeight app. This makes it offlimits to most casual Mac users who have no interest in Xcode or coding in general, but for the committed and those with Xcode, it’s a pretty neat little project.
Check out the embedded Tweet and video below to see the TrackWeight scale in action:
I tested the accuracy by putting my MacBook on top of a weighing scale and recording a video while adding pressure, then comparing frames.
You can see it’s pretty accurate! pic.twitter.com/etP8qlrGCh
— Krish Shah (@KrishRShah) July 21, 2025
This little app reminds me a lot of the handy and fun little tweak from a decade ago that allowed you to use the iPhone 6s touch screen as a scale, which continued to work up until Apple eventually ditched the force touch features on iPhone screens in favor of haptics. Alas, that’s no more, but TrackWeight kind of carries the torch further for Mac anyway.
Cheers to mjtsai for the heads up about this neat little Mac app!