Comment by jonhohle
2 days ago
25 years ago one of early engineering courses included a case study about Ingersol Rand (IIRC). They went out to work floors and saw how all the workers had modified their air wrenches in the same way, adding padding with tape in various areas. They realized they could probably make a better wrench if it had some of those ergonomics built in.
Maybe the next phase of Apple could return to flowing shapes and save our wrists.
> save our wrists
If your wrist is in contact with the edge of the laptop while you are actively typing, then your typing style has a good chance of giving you RSI. You'd be better off trying to fix that than trying to make the fast path to RSI more convenient.
How the f are you supposed to type? Ideally I'd like full support for my arms from the elbow to the wrist.
In my first job - i think it was in 1997, I had my own small room with an L-shaped desk with a rounded corner. That gave a few inches of space for resting my arms - both when typing on a quite reasonable Pentium laptop, and especially when using the mouse.
Since then, the desks and the chairs has become shittier and shittier. Except perhaps when a was a consultant for an HR-department.
The U-shaped desk was probably the best ergonomically designed workplace I've had. Maybe a wheat-filled pad along the desk would have made it better.
Like a person playing the piano.
If your arms are resting, then your fingers and wrists are doing the maximum amount of reaching as you type. If you use a wrist rest you are encouraging your fingers/wrist to reach up (bend in your wrist) instead of neutral or reaching down (more natural position).
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A more concrete way of putting it is if you are putting so much weight on your wrists that the edge of the MacBook is making you uncomfortable, you're probably doing it wrong.
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Design as a practice should study interaction with the object and fix harmful patterns. Keyboards aren't new, this should be a solved problem.
> Keyboards aren't new, this should be a solved problem
It is a solved problem.
The solution is PBCAK (Problem Between Chair And Keyboard).
When people learn the piano, they learn correct position. And a good piano teacher will not allow the student to get away with bad habits.
But if people come to the computer keyboard without the piano, they have no teacher watching them like a hawk.
They then develop bad habits and those bad habits are allowed stay with them the rest of their life.
Then those people bitch and moan about RSI becuase they are typing with the most ludicrous wrist positions.
I've heard this but I've personally been typing this way for 25+ years (wrists on the rest, including on laptops exclusively for the last 15) and my wrists are fine. Meanwhile people I know with ergonomic keyboards and everything that's supposed to save your wrists are the ones with bad wrists.
The reasonable takeaway from that correlation is that people with preexisting issues turn to ergonomic keyboards to avoid worsening those issues, not the other way round.
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Same. I’m middle age and type in a lot of non-ergonomic positions and always have. It works for me.
Too bad even the ergo desktop keyboards don't handle this properly
Interchangeable wrist area as an accessory for only 79.99$
Interchangeable? No, $250 upgrade, fused with the case at the factory and somehow electronically serialized
One time cost? This should be a subscription that raises spikes when you don't pay
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Per side.
Note: Left hand wrist areas are currently out of stock.
The right hand wrist area is the best we have ever made though.