I love Macbook trackpads, even use a Magic Trackpad at my desk, and "natural" scrolling has never felt right for me.

I suspect my mental model is locked into the "drag scrollbar handle down" mode from the early mouse era rather than "drag page up" mode that is intuitive to people who's first computing device had a touchscreen.

Another recommendation is LinearMouse. It lets you fix pretty much every problem that MacOS inflicts on mouse users: pointer acceleration, scroll behavior, click/button behavior. This and Karabiner make the OS much more usable for me.

Check out Scroll Reverser; it's a tiny, open source app that solves exactly this.

There are some other alternatives like BetterTouchTool if you want some other changes like gestures, but as far as this specific problem goes you can just `brew install scroll-reverser`, set up the settings you want and forget about it. Life is too short to deal with this nonsense which is clearly designed to sell the Magic Mouse.

https://pilotmoon.com/scrollreverser/

Thinking about it some more, it really is about consistency regarding the cursor. On my trackpad, not in "natural scrolling" mode, I get this:

  - One finger down moves the cursor down through the text.
  - Two fingers down moves the cursor down through the text (moving the text up)
  - Thumb-click plus one finger down moves the cursor down through the text (and selects).

  - One finger down moves the cursor down through the text.
  - Two fingers down moves the cursor up through the text (moving the text down)
  - Thumb-click plus one finger down moves the cursor down through the text and selects.

For me it's completely different with the same result: I imagine the scroll wheel is on the paper (screen), so my finger going down rolls the wheel and the bottom of the wheel pushes the paper (screen) under it upwards.

For whatever reason this persists to touchpads even though they would seem closer to a touchscreen.

I always viewed the classic scroll method as a mirror to what happens on screen.

> It makes sense on a trackpad too

No, it doesn't. Trackpads always worked fine until "they" reversed the motion. Now it's always a guessing game for the initial scroll. It's terrible, unintuitive, and doesn't make sense. "Natural" is unnatural.

So why doesn't the mouse pointer work that way on an Apple trackpad?

Surely if that's the case then when you move your finger to the upper left then the pointer should move to the bottom right. Because that's how it would work if it was a real object and you were pushing the pointer around with your finger. Why is scrolling a special case?

Honestly though, I wouldn't mind that much if Apple hadn't decided to call it "natural" scrolling, like you're weird if you prefer up for scroll up and down for scroll down. It's both smug and reeks of the same kinda of discriminatory attitude that made life hard for left handers.

What I did when I introduced my very non-technical partner to a mac was leave it at "natural" scrolling, show her the two-finger scroll gesture, let her try it out, then I turned off natural scrolling and asked her which she liked better. She picked the latter hands down. I knew there's a reason I'm with her :)

It's totally a matter of personal taste, both are objectively right depending on what one thinks the thing being manipulated is.

On any non-apple system it has the "natural" scroll on the touchpad AND sane scrolling behavior.

It's the ergonomics that I have an issue with.

All mice supported scrolling. In the before times, you use the mouse to drag the scroll thumb, which was located on the scrollbar. And you'd drag it down to see information further "down" in the document.

So I was a Mac user for years and accepted and adapted to natural scrolling after it appeared as the default in 2011. When I switched back to a Windows laptop for work around 2018, I kept it on natural mode.

But then two years ago I got a desktop computer with an external mouse again and.... natural scrolling doesn't work for me on a physical wheel. With a trackpad, the metaphor is direct, that the page or document is being moved by the motion of your fingers; but with a wheel, I still want to pull it toward me to scroll down, because that feels like rolling the little wheel along the document, or turning it to advance the document beneath, like a printer finishing a page.

Maybe that's all silly, but for me it's natural scrolling on trackpads and conventional scrolling on mice with scrollwheels.

My TV does have an audio jack. It's a cheap dumb TV. And almost all of my electronic devices have a 3.5 mm jack. You won't find it in top flagship models, but plenty of budget devices still have it.

My LG OLED TV does have a headphone jack, and I send that through a mixer (combined with my CRT gaming setup's output, my record player, and my PC's output) to my stereo.

I don't think I've ever owned any headphones with a long enough cable to plug into my tv when I'm sitting at a comfortable viewing position