Working From Home On Your MacBook Pro? Don't Do This

Around now around one quarter of the world's population is working from home - and for many that's a totally new experience. If Auckland is a barometer for global activity then a lot of people have been rushing out to equip their home offices for an extended period of home working. At PBTech, New Zealand's largest technology specialist, monitors were being snapped up, leaving shelves and warehouses bare.

For at least some of those buyers they'll probably be looking to setup something similar to the above, pairing a MacBook Pro or MacBook Air with an external mouse and keyboard to create a more desktop like experience.

Don't do this, especially if you have a model equipped with a Butterfly keyboard. Apple vents some of the heat from the body through the keyboard and with the lid closed fans will have to work harder to keep the laptop from thermal throttling. Worse, heat is suspected to be one of the reasons for the poor reliability of the Butterfly keyboard, causing premature failure of individual switch mechanisms.

So if you've setup something like the pictured arrangement do yourself a favour and keep the MacBook open - extend the screen from the built-in screen and gain some useful real estate at the same time.