This isn’t a review as such, because I believe such things are so subjective and personal that it’d be meaningless for me to recommend it or otherwise.
However, when I received my shiny new iMac i7 (with monster spec) just before the end of last year, I had opted for both the magic mouse and the magic trackpad. I really didn’t get on with the mouse but persisted with the trackpad (despite intermittent jumpiness in the mouse pointer when clicking – a story for another day) and in many ways really took to it.
A few months in (and having put up with that jumpiness – later folks 
) I am starting to suffer from pain in my right hand which I am wondering might be due to the use of the Magic Trackpad.
I took some time to observe how I use the trackpad and noticed that I’m always forced to use it with fingers curled and using my second finger as the scrolling finger and index finger as the clicking finger. Maybe that’s crazy but that’s how it’s ended up working for me.
Or not working: you see, whilst the thumb acts as a kind of ‘anchor’ for the hand, the remaining two fingers don’t do much, and I am wondering whether that might account for the increasing levels of discomfort I am finding. To be fair, I don’t spend all day using the trackpad – much of the day is spent actually at the keys – which makes me wonder whether the use of a trackpad for day-in, day-out use is actually quite a bad idea.
You might be wondering what the point of this post is – well, really I’m looking to see if anyone else has suffered any such ailments as a result of using a stand-alone trackpad – maybe I’m an isolated case, but I do wonder whether it might be a more widespread problem.
If you’re a Magic Trackpad user, and you’ve suffered, do leave a comment – it would be interesting to see how widespread this actually is.
Meantime, I’m going back to my ergonomic Logitech mouse. It might well use a wire and look a bit out-of-place next to the shrine of aluminium that is my Mac workplace, but it’s never let me down…
Try this terminal command to allow flipping the trackpad to a different angle at will:
sudo defaults write com.apple.MultitouchSupport ForceAutoOrientation YES
The orientation detection should become active after rebooting, reconnecting the trackpad, or changing other settings in the trackpad control panel. Just rest 5 fingers on the Magic Trackpad after turning it around and the cursor will thereafter move in the desired direction.
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20101029060726179
This is particularly helpful if you have a low desk, and may be combined with a wrist rest, tap click, and 3-finger drag!
Thanks, Chris – I’m planning to settle on a combination of trackpad-and-mouse, with a bit of swapping in-between the two. Good tip though!
For what it’s worth, I’ve been having some thumb & wrist pain that seems linked to my Magic Trackpad. Kind of feels like a sprain, with aches and pains in a line down my thumb and into my wrist. Turning keys and door knobs like this has been not fun.
Mainly, I think it’s from how I’m doing drag & drop: I press down with the side of my thumb in the corner to get the rubber foot button to click, then drag around with my index finger.
I think the repeated lateral stresses are the problem – as opposed to the more normal stress of gripping or clicking with the pad of my thumb.
I switched hands, and noticed my left hand starting to twinge too. So, now, I’m seeing how I do after turning on one-finger drag and drag lock. A little awkward, but it demands no real pressure on the pad and takes my thumb out of action altogether.
Since I’ve stopped using my thumb to click, things have been getting steadily better.
This is also what I have experienced from my use of the Magic Trackpad. I’ve switched to use the trackpad entirely, and I feel the strain from my left thumb and down to my wrist. I also use the left thumb to click and index finger to drag and move the mouse in general.
I’m not sure that it won’t be able to work for me though. We’ve all used a mouse for several years, and I have steadily increased my time using the computer over my teenage years. So perhaps we’ve all “trained” or hands to withstand this usage. Now all of a sudden we change the pattern to use the thumb and index fingers much more and in a different way.
I too have stopped clicking with my thumb, so hopefully that will releave some of the pain.. Hopefully.
Oh, also, about jumpiness in the Magic Trackpad: Depending on what kind of wifi you’re using, I discovered mine would get really erratic when Time Machine kicked in. Bluetooth from the trackpad and the data over wifi would conflict. Until I get a better router, I switched to a wired ethernet connection at my desk, and the Trackpad has been smooth ever since.
MMmmm…. never thought that it could be a conflict with wifi. My main machine (the i7 iMac) is on a wired connection but I have an N-based wifi in the office and my cellphone (HTC Desire) and a few other bits are generally receiving and transmitting. I wonder…
Oh, and I never did really use my thumb to click. It generally doesn’t get used at all with the Trackpad – I use my index and middle fingers to operate it.
I have been using the magic pad for 6 weeks. For the first month I used it on and off, but the the last 2 weeks I have unplugged the mouse. I am now experiencing pains in my forearm that feel like I have sprained a muscle (I use my thumb to bottom left corner click). At weekends (when I am not using the pad) my arm starts to get better, so for now it is back to the mouse so that my arm can recover
That’s not good, Stuart. I’d recommend leaving the trackpad alone if it’s doing that to you. I’ve adjusted the way I use mine and whilst I’m still not totally sure that it’s better, at least I’m not suffering any pain.
In my original post I said that I was planning to go back to a Logitech mouse but in actual fact I didn’t – I stuck with the Magic Trackpad, but I reckon I will eventually get around to swapping back to a nice ergonomic mouse of some description. I’ll certainly keep the Magic Trackpad, but might relegate it to the left hand side of the keyboard purely for gesture activities or easy scrolling.
I’m curious to see what OSX Lion brings, as what I’ve read suggests that it will be more heavily gestural and that could be a bad thing for those of us who simply don’t get on with the Magic Trackpad or Magic Mouse (which I really didn’t take to). Hopefully Apple won’t enforce gestures on us; if they did I would be very concerned about accessibility for one thing, given that not everyone wants to, or indeed is able to, work with a gestural input device.
Thought I would chime in – I don’t have the standalone trackpad, just the one built into my Macbook Pro – I used my MBP for most of this weekend, and started to notice that every click of the trackpad was causing discomfort. I continued on and this morning my hand is extremely sore accross my wrist. I think it’s the continuous clicking of my index finger on what’s actually a fairly firm button-press. I’ll be turning on tap-to-click.
I can report similiar symptoms to the ones above. The press-to-click action of the trackpad of my 13″ Macbook Pro is very firm and my natural behaviour is to use the side of my thumb to anchor the click and use my fingers to drag and manipulate objects. As a consequence, I’ve been getting pain in the side of my thumb and in my index and third finger because my usage of the Macbook Pro has increased dramatically in the last few months. I’m going to switch to the Magic Trackpad, which I perceive to have a softer clicking action and failing that, will revert back to a traditional mouse (I just don’t get on with the tap to click settings). I don’t particularly need or rate the gestural interface – for what I use my laptop for, a conventional mouse-oriented setup is fine – so I hope Apple continues to support both types of input in the future. Having used the Trackpad in the older Powerbooks, I think part of the issue is the degree of force needed to depress the click action in the more recent machines. Certainly, there is a massive difference between my 2004 12″ Powerbook and my 2009 13″ Macbook Pro. If they could revert back to a softer, more responsive pad then I think a lot of the problems might go away. Certainly, I’ve never had any kind of RSI during nearly 20 years of computer usage so it’s a bit worrying that problems should arise so quickly when I begin using the Macbook day in, day out.
Sorry to comment on such an old post, but I notice a lot of the comments are about problems due to clicking with the thumb to drag. If this is causing you a problem, you should change your trackpad preferences to enable ‘three finger drag’ (in the first tab, Point & Click). By default, the three finger swiping gesture is assigned to ‘Swipe between full screen apps’, in ‘More Gestures’, so you need to either disable that or change the gesture (e.g., to four fingers) before Three finger drag will work.
Once you’ve enable three finger drag, you can move windows, icons and select text by dragging with three fingers.
Three finger drag is a really excellent feature in its own right (it’s a shame it isn’t on by default), but it also saves you that awkward click and hold with your thumb which looks like it might be causing some people some problems.