Good posture with a MacBook: three setups that stop the hunch

A MacBook is built so that the screen and the keyboard are attached, and that is the whole posture problem. Put the keyboard where your hands are comfortable and the screen sits far below your eyes, so your head tips forward and your shoulders round. Raise the screen to eye level and the keyboard ends up near your chin. There is no position for a laptop on its own that gets both right.

The fix is to separate the two. Raise the MacBook on a stand and type on a separate keyboard and mouse or trackpad. Or put an external display in front of you and use the MacBook beside it or closed. When all you have is the laptop, set it up as well as you can and change position more often. All three are below.

Why a laptop pulls you into a hunch

Look at where your eyes go when you work on a MacBook flat on a desk. The top of the screen is well below eye level, so you look down at it. Your eyes can do some of that on their own, but over an hour your head drifts forward and down to help, and your upper back and shoulders follow it.

Your head is heavy, and the further it moves forward of your shoulders, the harder the muscles at the back of your neck and upper back have to work to hold it there. That is why a long laptop session tends to end with a stiff neck and tight shoulders, even though you were sitting still the whole time.

Two other things make it worse:

• The screen is small and close. If text is hard to read, you lean in, and leaning in brings your head even further forward. Making text bigger helps more than people expect. There are several ways to do it in making text bigger on a Mac.
• The trackpad is in front of the keyboard. Your hands rest close to your body and low, which tends to pull your shoulders forward and your elbows in.

None of this means that one slouch does damage. Bodies are built to move and change position. The trouble is holding the same hunched shape for hours.

Setup 1: a laptop stand plus a keyboard and mouse

This is the most useful change you can make for the least effort, and it works at home, in an office or on the road.

1. Raise the MacBook. Put it on a stand, or a stack of sturdy books, so that the top of the screen is at or slightly below eye level when you sit up straight. You should look slightly down at the middle of the screen, not straight ahead or up.
2. Set the distance. With your back against the chair, push the screen to about an arm's length. If you can't read it from there, make the text bigger rather than pulling the screen closer.
3. Add a keyboard. Any external keyboard works. Put it on the desk in front of you, close enough that your upper arms hang by your sides and your elbows bend to about a right angle.
4. Add a mouse or trackpad. Keep it beside the keyboard and level with it, so you don't reach out to the side for it. A Magic Trackpad keeps the gestures you already know.
5. Check your chair. Feet flat on the floor or on a footrest, back against the backrest, shoulders relaxed.

Pick a stand that holds the MacBook firmly and leaves room for air around it. For travel there are folding stands that pack flat, and a slim keyboard fits in most laptop bags.

Setup 2: an external display

If you work at the same desk most days, an external display gives you a bigger screen at the right height and lets the MacBook step aside.

• Put the display you use most directly in front of you, with its top edge at or slightly below eye level and about an arm's length away. Larger displays are usually more comfortable a little further back.
• Use the MacBook beside it as a second screen, raised on a stand so that its screen is at roughly the same height as the main one. Turning your head to a low laptop screen all day brings the hunch back.
• Or close the lid and use the external display with a keyboard and mouse. With the MacBook closed, the display in front of you is your only screen, which keeps your head straight.
• Make the screen in front of you the main display. In System Settings > Displays, recent versions of macOS let you choose the main display when more than one is connected: look for a Use as menu, or click Arrange and drag the menu bar onto the display you want.

There is more on arranging two screens in MacBook and external display setups.

Setup 3: just the laptop

Sometimes you have only the MacBook: a hotel room, a train, a friend's kitchen table. You cannot get both heights right, so the aim is to get them less wrong and to move more.

• Decide what you are mostly doing. For a long stretch of typing, keep the laptop on the table where your hands are comfortable and accept looking down. For reading, watching or a video call, raise it on a few books and use the keyboard less.
• Tilt the screen back a little further, so that you can see it with less bend in your neck.
• Sit back in the chair with your back against the backrest instead of perching on the front edge and leaning over the table.
• Bring the laptop toward you so that you don't reach forward to type, and keep your elbows by your sides.
• Make the text bigger so that you aren't tempted to lean in.
• Change position often. Swap between the table and a raised spot, stand for a while at a counter, and get up between tasks.

Working from a sofa or a bed is its own challenge, and working from the couch with a MacBook covers it.

Habits that matter as much as the setup

Even a perfect desk will not help much if you sit in it without moving for half a day. Physiotherapists often say that the best posture is your next one: shifting, standing and changing position through the day does more than holding one ideal shape.

• Check in with your body now and then. Is your head forward of your shoulders? Are your shoulders up near your ears? Let them drop, and let your jaw loosen while you are at it.
• Get up between tasks. A few minutes on your feet after a meeting or before the next email breaks up the long sit.
• Notice the slow drift. Most people start a session sitting back and end it hunched over the keyboard. Catching the drift early is easier than fixing a stiff neck later.

If you have neck, shoulder or back pain that lasts, comes with numbness or tingling, or gets worse, see a doctor or a physiotherapist. A better setup helps with everyday stiffness. It is not a treatment.

A nudge when the hunch creeps back

The habits above are the hard part, because the drift happens while you are concentrating. That is the job of the Posture characters in Notchpals. Your crew holds one character per area, so for Posture it might be Sir Pounce, a cat with a monocle and high standards, or Barnaby, an unflappable butler. Whichever you choose comes out of the notch for two repeating checks, Posture check and Shoulders down, plus one Screen distance visit a day, some time between 2 and 7 PM. For a MacBook user, that last one is the one that counts:

Sir PounceScreen at eye level, please. I reserve looking down for dogs.

Press Done once you have sat back and raised the screen, or Later if you are mid-sentence; it returns once, 20 minutes later. The repeating checks draw on one daily allowance that your whole crew shares. Normal, the default, is 8 repeating reminders a day across the crew, so a posture check turns up now and then rather than hovering over you. Chatty raises the number and Calm lowers it.

The characters also follow whichever setup you choose. With the MacBook open on a stand beside an external display, they still use its notch, even when the external display is the main one. Close the lid and they move to the external display, where Notchpals draws a black island, centered at the top of the screen, for them to peek out of.