Menu Close

My Biggest Problem with the MacBook Pro Isn’t the Keyboard

Do a quick Internet search for “MacBook Pro keyboard problems” and you’ll see how unreliable the keyboard has been for many users. Further, some users hate the short travel of the keys. I haven’t had any reliability issues with the keyboard, and I actually love the feel of the keyboard.

Now that I’ve jinxed myself, it’s time for me to talk about my biggest problem with the MacBook Pro – the trackpad. The trackpad on my 2017 MacBook Pro is so huge, that it constantly registers misclicks, causing my cursor to randomly jump around a document. Bottom line, for me the palm rejection on the new MacBook Pro is horrible.

My attempted fix

I type with my palms raised a bit, and my fingers dangling down, which might be what is causing the misclicks. I tried for weeks to retrain myself to keep my palms resting on the keyboard, which, oddly, is how I type on a desktop keyboard. I could never get myself to do it consistently on the MacBook, and even when I did I got misclicks. Back to the drawing board.

My final fix

My final fix was to turn off the tap-to-click option in the Trackpad settings on my MacBook. I’ve been a tap-to-click person for as long as I can remember, so I really wanted to avoid this. Ultimately, I didn’t have a choice. Worse, I made the change on my iMac, too, so I would have a consistent experience across devices.

I HATE having to forcibly click the trackpad. Often that click doesn’t even register at all, and when it does it slows me down. But at least typing on the MacBook Pro isn’t horrible.

An attempted tweak

I thought I could bring BetterTouchTool into the equation to get back to tap-to-click. I set up tap areas around the edges of the trackpad, where a tap would register as a click. That just brought back the original problem.

Resignation

It looks like I’m a click person, until Apple fixes this monstrosity of a trackpad.