I appreciate that ergonomics of laptops in general has never been great, but does the trackpad on the M2 Air and newer MBPs really have to be quite so darned large? I’ve been mostly putting up with the occasional unwanted trackpad input as my thumb brushes the top edge of the trackpad for a while now. Without any gestures activated in Settings, the worst effect is that the cursor goes into the wrong place and I have to relocate my typing insertions. But, recently I accidentally shut down a VM in the middle of a delicate operation rendering it unbootable, and I thought I’d ask: how do you feel about the trackpad’s size, do you experience the problem of accidental input, and what do you do about it? I’m trying my absolute best not to brush the trackpad, keeping my palms wide apart and my arms straight, as is good posture, but ultimately it still happens from time to time, and short of just turning it off altogether (which also seems strangely hard to do) I’m stuck for any real solution other than just tucking my thumbs as hard as I can, typing more slowly and carefully and hoping it doesn’t happen again. Any thoughts?
I love it. I haven’t had any issues with it at all. Fwiw, I have tap to click turned off. I’ve always hated that setting; I have to press the trackpad to click.
Thanks. Yep I have tap-to-click off as well, but unfortunately it still happens that I can “split tap” if two fingers happen to brush it at the same time, which VoiceOver treats as equivalent to a double-tap to activate. This is rare enough that I just live with it. I am trying to develop strategies for locating the space bar by touch with my thumbs starting from the top of the keyboard, and getting the distance between my thumb and fingers right more often as a result. Who knows—I might just learn to compensate for this.
Likewise. I always disable all the tap-based options on all my trackpad devices (Mac and PC laptops). Far too many false clicks, no matter how I configure palm-rejection logic.
I use other gestures - all the various pinch/drag gestures with various numbers of fingers, but none of the tap gestures. And I don’t enable the left/right side clicks. I always use Ctrl-click when I’m using an Apple trackpad (on my PC laptops, there are two or three physical buttons which i use for clicking).
As a touch-typist, I always feel for the raised surfaces on the F and J keys for positioning my hand.
Yes, I position my hands to type all right, the problem is that the space bar is flush with the trackpad and there’s no distance between the two, so I find not touching it with my thumb surprisingly hard sometimes. My strategy seems to be to start with thumbs and fingers pinched together on the home row, then gradually extending thumbs downward until they locate the space bar, typing as best I can with the measured distance in mind. But I definitely don’t feel that this is a paragon of ergonomics—if the trackpad were just a bit further from the keyboard, with a noticeable tactile border above it, I’m almost certain this would not happen. I appreciate it’s a MacBook Air, but this is supposed to be the more comfortable keyboard; I haven’t had a problem like this on any other laptop including the earlier Airs.
Sadly, Apple is obsessed with making laptop keyboards thinner and thinner, reducing the travel distance to the point where the tactile response isn’t much better than a projection keyboard.
I’ve never been a fan of any of Apple’s laptop keyboards. I was fairly happy with the one in my old iBook G4. I am relatively comfortable with the one in my 2011 MacBook Air. I really don’t like anything Apple is selling today.
On a desktop system, you can just buy whatever USB keyboard you like and avoid the mess, but on a laptop, you don’t have much of choice unless you want to lug around a keyboard (and cables and maybe also a USB hub) with you wherever you go.
Hey Apple (just in case anyone is reading this): Stop the madness. Just make the computer 1-2mm thicker and provide a keyboard that has some real travel. Although not ideal, they keys in your old USB keyboard (model A1243) are lightyears better than anything you’re building into any laptop. I promise you nobody is going to switch away because of it and you’ll make your actual users happier.
Just in case some people aren’t aware, these days there’s an actual setting to adjust how hard a tap has to be to register.
Settings > Trackpad > Point & Click > Click
I used to have the exact opposite problem as discussed here. My taps were apparently to soft and weren’t being recognized (despite tap to click on). Moved that slider all the way to Light and problem went away. 
I love my Das tactile keyboard, and it pleases me to know that I can move it from my current iMac to a potential new Mac Studio if I want in future. About the only downside (because there’s always one, right?) is that you could not use Touch ID with a third party keyboard and there’s no equivalent approach for fingerprint input; the best option is probably then to wear an Apple Watch and conduct your ApplePay transactions, auto-unlock and authenticate (but not sign off on Apple store transactions, which you just leave unauthenticated) through the watch, which isn’t really the same but is probably good enough for me.