So many people I've talked to have never noticed the sharp edges of the mac pro. But they irritate the living crap out of me. After a few hours use, it starts to feel like I've been grinding my forearms with sandpaper.
Tangential public service announcement: Your forearms should not be digging into the edge of the laptop. If they are, you are positioning your hands and wrists in an uncomfortable and inefficient way which has a good chance of leading to RSI. Irrespective of the smoothness of the laptop corners, don’t do this!
Ideally you shouldn‘t be putting any significant pressure on any surface with your forearms, palms, or wrists while actively typing. You want your hands “floating” with the fingertips resting very lightly on the key tops. But even if you must rest your hands or arms on something, please keep your wrists as straight as possible, and especially avoid wrist flexion or extension.
The surface of your laptop should be more-or-less parallel with the plane of your forearms, with the keyboard kept close to your torso so that your shoulders can remain relaxed with your upper arms hanging down at your sides. (This reduces the torque your arms put on your shoulder, allowing you to comfortably support your arms without any need for external props.)
If you have a tall desk and a low chair, and can’t change furniture, the way to work around the poor furniture design is to either (a) move the laptop to a low tray or directly onto your lap, or (b) prop the back side of the laptop up so that the base of the laptop is tilted toward you, with the keyboard parallel to your forearms. Keep the laptop (or whatever other keyboard) near the edge of the desk.
This is a terrible argument to justify a poor design. There are plenty of times you need to use a laptop in non-ideal situations, such as a car or plane. The laptop should not punish you for having to operate it outside perfect conditions.
There is no condition where you should have your forearm digging into the front edge of the laptop.
If you come up with a body shape and context and I guarantee you we can come up with a more comfortable way to position the laptop than anything requiring wrists bent downward.
This is not about the design of the Macbook: the same goes for any other laptop, however smooth and soft its front edge might be.
Before I began to type this, I was resting my hands on the (thankfully hand-friendly) edge of my laptop, one finger on the page-down key. I probably do as much reading on my laptop as I do typing.
Some people use their laptops in wider situations than others. Having had creases pressed into my forearms by the edge of my MacBook while using it in various non-ideal and uncomfortable seating situation, usually on the go, I can easily say you are not one of them. Implying that we’re being dishonest or somehow incapable of using a keyboard is a bit insulting.
Huh? I don’t think anyone here is dishonest or incapable of using a keyboard. (Indeed, I’m convinced that idlewords is one of the most honest and generally capable people around.)
I said people who are digging their forearms into their laptop edges are probably bending their wrists down in a way that puts strain on the tendons used for typing (not to mention putting direct pressure on the tendon sheaths for the finger flexors), so they should be careful about RSI.
Yes this is true, but many of those ways put considerable strain on their hands and wrists and commonly lead to serious injury. If the forearms are digging into the corners of the laptop, that almost certainly means that the wrists are extended (bent downward), which puts the tendons/joints used for typing into a weak and injury-prone part of their range of motion.
People should do whatever works for them and listen to their own bodies, but should be really careful with computer keyboards. I know many professional computer-users who did themselves serious harm with significant impact to their careers.
If something hurts even a little bit, please don’t try to work through the pain.
Sometimes the pain is caused by a razor-sharp laptop edge, which is the point of the post. I type in two main positions–on my back like an otter, or lying face down on a mattress. I'm guessing some people here type suspended upside down from a gravity swing. The computer case design shouldn't punish us for our typing choices!
Lying on your back or lying face down or suspended from a gravity swing are all fine (albeit perhaps not ideal for very long stretches).
In none of these cases should your forearms be digging into the edge of the laptop. If they are something else is wrong about the position.
I occasionally type sitting on a couch, lying on my back on a bed, sitting at crappy furniture at a coffeeshop, sitting on the floor, with one hand on a tall table while tending to toddlers, etc.
In any of those contexts, it is possible to find a way of typing with straight wrists.
This really has nothing to do with the computer case design; the previous poster should adjust his or her posture irrespective of laptop choice. RSI is no joke.
When the unibody Mac first came out the edges were so sharp they sliced your wrists. It took a few years for them to finally release them with a small radius on the edge. Just a few mm made a huge difference. There were some YouTube videos of people sanding them down to make it more bearable. Terrible design decision to have such a sharp edge but somebody really wanted that "crisp" edge look.
