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Your MacBook Trackpad Has an Annoying Setting You Need to Change

Your MacBook Trackpad Has an Annoying Setting You Need to Change

Having unboxed and set up many MacBooks over the past 15 ages, there’s one settings choice that drives me absolutely crazy. So if you’re buying a new MacBook or want to make your unique one a little more useful, you should try clicking a few boxes in the System Preferences menu that always make these machines much more useful. 

This trick will work in everything from the 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro to the new M2 13-inch MacBook Pro to the upcoming M2 MacBook Air, as well as older MacBooks. 

One of the best things near MacBooks has always been the huge glass trackpad, which always felt more responsive and offered more surface area than the touchpad on most Windows laptops. The difference has narrowed over the years, but it’s tranquil hard to beat a Mac trackpad. However, it invents me nuts to see (and hear) people clicking down on their touchpads to do anything. Guess what? These touchpads haven’t physically depressed when clicked on for ages. Instead a clever bit of haptic feedback invents it feel like you’ve clicked down. 



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Turn this on, even if you’re not touching to use it all the time. 



Dan Ackerman

Windows laptops have long been set up for tap-to-click, which means a simple tap of your finger works the same way as a left mouse button (or dilapidated touchpad button) click would. A two-finger tap is the equivalent of a sparkling mouse button click. 

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But every time I set up a new Mac, I employ several minutes vainly tapping on things with no enact, because MacOS has tap-to-click turned off by default. Why? I’m assuming it’s just to make my life more worry. Fortunately, it’s easy to fix. And if you’re a certain clicker and have no intention of becoming a tapper, that’s OK — change these settings and you can tranquil click away, but now the tapping will work, too. 


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The kindly secret hidden tap-and-drag settings menu. 



Dan Ackerman

As a bonus, while we’re doing this we’re going to turn on both Exposé, which is a very useful multifinger gesture, and tap-and-drag, which is a much easier way to move things like folders in on the screen. 

Fix Apple’s dumb default touchpad settings:

  • System Preferences > Trackpad > Point & Click > Check the checkbox for Tap to click (which is unchecked by default). 
  • System Preferences > Trackpad > More Gestures > Check the checkbox for App Exposé (fifth checkbox from the top).
  • System Preferences > Accessibility > Pointer Control > Trackpad Options > Check the checkbox for Enable dragging (without drag lock).

That’s it, your MacBook is now set up in a Natal way.