I've not yet heard complaints about apple's choice to oversize trackpads on laptops, in particular, the MacBook Pro series. By jamming the pad into the keyboard, a vital 1/2 cm of space between the space bar and the trackpad where my thumbs tend to dawdle on earlier laptops has now disappeared. My thumbs have not. Add to this the heightened sensitivity to "hovering" on the new trackpads and I find typing on the new MacBook an absolute nightmare. No matter how hard I try, the thumbs will naturally drift down close enough to the trackpad to send the cursor flying, and before I can catch myself, I've typed three words in the middle of some sentence above, to the right or to the left of where I was supposed to be typing. This is not just an inconvenience; I consider it yet another design flaw, and an egregious one because it signals that Apple's design people really didn't think about how people actually USE laptops. And why such an oversized trackpad? I can't imagine that this extra 50mm is a significant improvement for very many users. So when I consider the dodgy new keyboard itself, the loss of the magnetic power attachment (one of the most brilliant technical innovations ever made to laptops) and the USB C fiasco (does anyone's USB C plugs actually "snap" in any more after a handful of uses? Mine just seem to hang there and fall out if I tilt the laptop too much,) I am gutted. That magic "Apple" experience is totally gone, hanging on only a mystique that gets more and more tenuous every time I use my laptop.
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New Mac Oversized Track Pads...
- Thread starter dbsummerville
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I had similar problems. Had to turn off the touch to click or whatever it’s called. That helped some. But shouldn’t be required. Somewhere along the way the “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it” got lost for marketing hype to drive sales I’m guessing. Changing things just to make something appear shiny/new in hopes of creating upgrade desire is what I’m feeling. My iPhone XS has connectivity issues. Poor antenna design embedded behind too much metal. I get 2 or 3 bars in weak areas but frequently have no data error messages occurring. My wife’s X is just fine in the same room when this is happening. I’m going to find a used X and get rid of this XS. But back to laptop... yea, how about no thinner with proper cooling too? I mean at some point we have to actually use these devices to do things. Count me another frustrated fanboy too.
I love the large trackpad. I don't have any issues with it. When I type, my thumbs naturally lie on the space bar or just above it. When I use the trackpad, I like having a large surface area so I can have a slowish tracking speed and still navigate just about anywhere on the screen without multiple swipes. Unfortunately, it's impossible to accommodate everybody's habits, and there's a certain degree to which you just need to adapt your usage to the device you have rather than expecting the device to conform to your ingrained habits.
