Drop them like it’s hot!

C2: Homo-religious

C3: Homo-enginerus

C4: Homo-bros

If I have it in my lap, the outer ball of each wrist is resting on the body to the left and right of the trackpad and that means my forearms are angled upwards, away from the edges. They never rest on the edge of the laptop until I use the trackpad, and then the puffy outer pad of my palm is resting on the laptop edge. Still very comfortable.

If I'm using it at a desk it's the same story. My seat is high enough (relative to the desk) that my forearms lift up and away from the laptop. Never resting on the edge.

Are people seated so low so that the desk height is at breast level and they're making T-Rex arms to reach the keyboard? It seems so intuitively obvious to avoid such positions.

I care about the sharp edges because they 1) they’re not actually that sharp. 2) I don’t rest my wrists on them.

I mostly work from a desk with an external monitor and the laptop cantered below it. I avoid mice and try to use keyboard shortcuts.

I’ve used Dells, HPs and Thinkpads and the current MacBook Pros are still my favourite design.

Horses for courses, I guess.

And yes the keyboards are terrible too. Up to 2015 it was OK but I can't work with the butterfly ones and the "new and improved" scissor ones that came after that. They still have a lot less travel than the ones from up to 2015.

I never sanded my metal macbooks though I did do so with a plastic one I had. I just didn't really use them much as laptop anymore.

- Battery: no other laptop comes even close

- Trackpad: I don't use a mouse anymore, no other laptop comes close

- Audio: No other laptop comes close

"Sharp edges" really don't bother me to be honest, I wouldn't have noticed it if nobody told me.

I have a nano-texture screen, and it works great in daylight.

Just goes to show how opinions can differ.

Maybe the next phase of Apple could return to flowing shapes and save our wrists.

I also really like this article and am 100% supportive of people messing around and modifying their stuff.

The modding community is a shadow of its old self these days

It's easy for me to feel the mains frequency while gently rubbing the top surface of the MacBook while it's plugged in. Really feels unsafe, but neither me nor the computer have suffered any serious injuries yet.

> acidic sweat. once you got through the anodization the raw aluminum wears faster....

If one files off the sharp edges, won’t the sweat eat through everything faster, as that protective layer was filed off.

Can it cause the plastic on the mouse to break down?

I would propose boundaries that align partly with how I perceive the weather, and partly with how we plan our year (by months): Summer starts June 1st, Fall starts September 1st, Winter starts December 1st, and Spring starts March 1st.

In Australia it's just split up by months, with each season being 3 months long:

March 1 - Autumn starts June 1 - Winter starts Sept 1 - Spring starts Dec 1 - Summer starts

Of cause, those in far northern Australia, only really have Dry and Wet seasons. I have no idea when those are.

In India our summer holidays start at the end of March and finish in the start of June. That’s usually our hottest months too. And a lot of our regional “New Year” calendar’s and related festivals are on April 14th and can probably be considered the start of summer.

That said being an English speaking country and absorbing a lot of media from other English speaking countries, there’s been a slow drift towards the American system making its way in, so younger generations are more likely to use American seasons and older people more likely to use traditional seasons, though you’ll find people of all age groups using either. Certainly they taught the traditional seasons in school when I was a kid, I wonder which they teach now.

(Of course, you could make yet another system based on the weather where summer is approximately two weeks in July, winter is a thing that happens every few years and the rest is a sequence of mild weather with occasional wind and scattered showers)

https://youtu.be/y8HEZ-x4-_w?t=402

Getting the shade right could be tricky though.

These objects are becoming more like clothing and less like unyielding industrial machines. It's to the point that I'd be genuinely disgusted to handle any used laptop regardless of how "clean" it is.

they intentionally ship them sharp so you can file them down to your desired fillet

the design is very human

They are quite stabby and I hate them.

https://www.cnet.com/a/img/resize/aca51a7051edc493b19cfd93da...

Unibody Intels before that were really really sharp.

I have intrusive thoughts of trying to cut my finger over it, but so far the attempts were unsuccesful.

Alternatively, because they care about aesthetics more than utility and comfort.

But the obvious way to handle that problem is to put it in a case. For example: https://www.itslaut.com/products/crystal-x-case-for-macbook-...

I wasn't thrilled with a product design that required a case to protect the rest of the world from the product, but it obviously makes more sense than trying to file the MacBook yourself.

So the seam looks neat when the macbook is closed, eg. https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/MacBo...

get a single-cut fine file, maybe with a little more weight than the one in the video. single cut file has diagonal slots and allows firm and continuous contact with the piece. most files are double cut, have two sets of slots and look like bumpy diamonds. they remove more material but tend to bounce.

use long even strokes with firm pressure, only during the fore stroke. watch out for roll-off, where you unconsciously change the angle or pressure of the file as you're at the end of the stroke.

you can make a pretty even-looking chamfer that way.

Literally "you're holding it wrong".

It's a laptop computer.

Now the only annoying things are the MacOS window manager (uBar attempts to fix this, but is flaky) and the weird keyboard mappings for things like "start of line", "end of line", "previous word", etc. Karabiner fixes those if you're willing to invest 3 hours in setting it up.

Though you're right that machines whose exteriors are customized and unusual are less likely to get stolen.

I'm betting they don't notice if I file down the corners. Hell they probably wouldn't notice if I just cut the corners off with a fret saw. But God forbid I try to install an ad blocker or use Firefox.

"Ethical standpoint" seems like the wrong choice of words. I think you mean "equipment ownership standpoint.". Ethical implies a set of values, vs contractual terms of equipment use.

You can't be unethical to your employer, only to people like your coworkers and customers, or other living beings that your business activity impacts.

It looks a bit strange, but to each their own, I suppose.

EDIT: this thing, below the trackpad https://imgur.com/a/DVzlDOj (What’s that even called? And is there a better image hosting service than Imgur?)

3 physical buttons below the touchpad. That removed really many laptops. They would be nearly zero today, or really zero.

15 inches screen. Common.

Matte finish. Common.

User serviceable hardware. That removed many other laptops.

No number pad. I had to give up on that or I would have no laptop to buy.

I ended up with the first generation HP ZBook 15.

found the Windows 8 enthusiast! haha, I kid. (I myself use a tiling window manager , i3, with completely square windows without any gaps or rounding)

They don't have to be any particular shape or size. The property of being virtual overrides everything else when free of these self-imposed constraints.

Even if you lose the GUI and go back to text, the ideal terminal is a plane of infinite columns of arbitrary cell size that dynamically fills your field of view.

I'd further argue that the only reason VR/AR isn't more widely adopted is the lack of orthographic vs perspective modality per application (and uncomfortable headsets). In VR/AR, you don't want a window manager or even windows at all. What you want is a field manager (as in FOV "fields" of varying opacity that can be composited by the user). Shape and size is just an arbitrary region blended in with the environment.

For the sake of ergonomics, you'd more often prefer to project an interface onto a surface if you had the choice. When you don't, you probably want the projection to be orthographic, but for the edges to be fuzzy if not invisible. You'd generally want to be able to layer these interfaces as well instead of having opaque rectangles always in your way.

> This was on my work computer. I expect to similarly modify future work computers, and I would be happy to help you modify yours if you need a little encouragement.

I don’t understand the actual decision but I appreciate the gusto with which it was made.

Do you have a brand you'd recommend?

I was worried about scratches because I abuse the shit out of anything I wear, and sure enough, there are scratches in the titanium bezel, but they look good in a way that scratches on my (non-pro) steel Apple Watch did not.

https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2F...