Synaptics, the company responsible for the trackpads in many of today's laptops, has made a pair of announcements today geared at making laptops even thinner and lighter than they already are. Its new ThinTouch keyboards and ForcePad trackpads use enhanced touch sensitivity to reduce the thickness of both by about half.

The ThinTouch keyboard uses capacitive touch rather than the commonly-used scissor switches for input—the capacitive keys actually record your keystrokes, but the keys still move a few millimeters in order to simulate the same feeling of key travel that you get in most island-style keyboards today. Without the need to include a physical switch to register input, the keyboard can be made much thinner—up to 50 percent, according to Synaptics. Anandtech reports that the removal of physical switches also makes keyboards easier to backlight, and the mechanically simpler keys could potentially be more durable than current keyboards.

The ForcePad trackpad, on the other hand, seeks to become thinner by removing physical movement entirely. Rather than including physical buttons or one large clickable surface like current trackpads, the ForcePad is a large, immovable pressure-sensitive slab. Applying less pressure to the trackpad will simply move the mouse cursor, while applying more pressure on one or more points simulates a click (the ForcePad supports 64 pressure levels for up to five fingers at once, according to Anandtech). While the ThinTouch goes to pains to simulate a keyboard with physical switches, the ForcePad actually changes trackpad behavior to achieve its 40 percent thinner profile, and as such it may have a steeper learning curve than the ThinTouch keyboards.

Each of these new products should be available to OEMs at some point in 2013. With them, we're talking about a difference of millimeters—certainly not enough to substantially alter the height of a given laptop—but in today's Ultrabooks those millimeters could be better used by a larger battery, faster internals, or better cooling systems. As we discussed last week, the difference in thickness between Apple's highly integrated MacBook Air and ASUS' more repairable Zenbook UX32VD is measured in millimeters—Synaptics' new keyboard and trackpad could be used to eliminate that sort of tradeoff entirely.