That sounds like you have your desk too low. You're going to get some major repetitive strain injuries in 10-20 years.

If you have your arms at your sides, elbows should bend 90 degrees. Then just move your arms slightly forward and you'll end up somewhere around 95 degrees. Now you can rest your forearms on the desk. This won't save you from all kinds of RSI, but it might help your wrists, elbows and shoulder joints last a bit longer.

Ergonomics is one of those things where you don't understand it until it effects you. Everyone can tolerate discomfort at some level and at different levels but obviously there best practices that manufacturers can partake in to make hardware more ergonomic.

For example, the monitor should be at eye level vertically but with laptop that's very hard to accomplish unless you position yourself in a reclined fashion to bring down your eye level closer to your lap - on a macbook you get wrist cuts like this.

One of the most important thing that makes a good ergonomic laptop is the ways it accomodates as many positions and setup as posible so your can rotate your working position to avoid excessive strain on one particular area. So when your back is tired you slouch down, when your wrists are tired you straighten up, when your eyes are tired you adjust the display brightness/theme etc.

When taken seriously it's totally possible to work safely even in poor conditions like outside or on a train but devices that completely ignore ergonomics just don't even give you the chance.

People have differently sized hands too: with my fingers on the home row, 13" and 14" Macs have the heels of my hands resting exactly on the sharp bottom edge.

Glare from the screen can affect you more if you have problems with halos in general (many vision problems can cause them, and fatigue won't help either), causing reflections to disproportionately affect legibility of the screen for you.

Finally, the keyboards are simply bad in comparison to best keyboards (in terms of typing feedback) on small portable laptops like Thinkpad X1 Carbons (though those have gotten significantly worse with Gen 7 onwards too).

Additional gripe I'd have is that they are very heavy in this day and age when we are getting laptops under 1kg (2.2lbs) in 14" size that perform and hold battery adequately well. This only hurts if you travel a lot and carry more than one laptop with you (business and personal, for instance).

But really, ergonomics is hard because everyone is different, and as long as you are outside the 2 SDs from average (and you can be so only on one of those measures, like your hand size or torso height or head size), your ergonomic position might be impossible.

You may have smaller hands (no offense meant); imagining my hands in the position you explained, my fingers would be well outside of where they need to be. I have the same issue as OP, the corners dig into my heel/wrist area. I do have big banana hands though.

> I hear people complain about laptop ergonomics all of the time and I don't understand it. I have zero issues with either of my Macbooks.

It's almost like y'all are different people...