My biggest frustration with the Macbook Pro, and how I solved it

For all of you Mac experts, this is sure going to seem remedial. I only bought my first new MacBook Pro a few months ago. I wrote about it here. 

And it’s been a big source of frustration to me — and, no, I don’t mean learning the ins and outs of all-things-Apple. That’s been the easy part as I already have an iPhone and an iPad and have for years. 

I mean the MacBook Pro track pad. It is maddening. 

First, the MacBook Pro cursor has a tendency to disappear, like all the time. Every other move results in the cursor disappearing. 

But, second, the haptic effects of the track pad are super underwhelming. When I click something, it never really clicks. 

So, the track pad leaves me with a lost cursor and no sense of whether I clicked on what I clicked. It’s made me want to dump this $3,500 laptop in the river. When you spend $3,500 on something, you don’t do that. 

Besides — this is a MacBook Pro with an i9 processor, 32GB of RAM and 1TB storage. I’m not *not* going to master this son-of-a-gun. But I might have to accessorize it to death along the way — and that’s why I bought a mouse. And as per usual, I purchased the Amazon’s Choice, a pretty generic wireless mouse. One of the reasons I really like Amazon’s Choice products is that you can almost always get them next-day. 

I liked this one because it’s plug-and-play, meaning you ad a little ‘C’-connection doohickey into your laptop and then a USB connector into that — and, voila, your mouse works. Or it’s supposed to. 

Did it in this case? 

Heck to the yes, and it feels good when stuff works exactly as it said it would. I’ve added a link to the product, below, and YES it’s an Amazon Affiliate link. I’ve never made a dime from Amazon Affiliates, so if you end up purchasing this from the link, you’ll likely be my first customer. However, THAT is something else I’m wanting to master, so I’m going to do like P!nk and “Try, try, try.” 

Click here for the Amazon’s Choice MacBook Wireless Mouse.

And as for the cursor: there are two hacks I’ve found for that: 

1. Close your MacBook and immediately re-open it.
   
2. Make your cursor bigger. You can do that through Siri, but the way you need to ask is to “increase the size of your mouse pointer.”

For me, the mouse alone has reduced by MacBook frustration by 90 percent, and maybe it’s coincidence, but my cursor has been with me ever since I installed it. Boom!