There鈥檚 a design flaw in Apple鈥檚 current lineup of Mac
keyboards; easily fixed though. Obviously, someone like me has a long history
and an intense
relationship with keyboards.
The Flaw
Right now, Apple sells two keyboards: larger/wired and smaller/Bluetooth.
The larger one includes the useful cluster with arrow keys, page up/down,
home/end, 鈥渇n鈥, and the real 鈥渄elete鈥 key. The 鈥渃ontrol鈥 key is
large, at the lower left, and by some physical-mechanical equivalent of
Fitt鈥檚
Law, is real easy to get to.
It also includes the
entirely-useless numeric keypad. All this occupies quite a bit of
real-estate.
The smaller one (really a lot smaller) squeezes
tiny arrow keys into a corner, has an ultra-miniature 鈥渃ontrol鈥 key, gives
鈥渇n鈥 the prized bottom-left-corner position, and entirely omits those other
useful keys.
There are several design flaws here. First, people who need an extra numeric
keypad really need it, but there鈥檚 a huge number of us for whom they鈥檙e a
waste of precious desktop space. Second, the idea that whether or not you
need certain
keys is related to whether you want to connect with a wire or not seems
spurious. Third, the notion that any outboard keyboard should omit
page up/down, home/end, delete, and so on, is just wrong.
So, I want keyboards that can be ordered in either USB and Bluetooth, and
either with or without the numeric cluster, but always have the first outboard
cluster.
In exchange for this valuable advice to Apple, I鈥檒l expect a nice juicy
reward in the mail ASAP. Just like they showered me with gold for
detecting and diagnosing the previously-broken list-selection code in
Mail.app; well, I had to split the reward with
John
Gruber.
Is It a Good Keyboard?
The current line-up of Apple keyboards isn鈥檛 good, it is (the sizing flaw
aside) great. The feel is both sensitive and rock-solid and I think
I鈥檓 typing faster than any time in the last twenty years or so.
Which means I get to do an old-fart keyboard digression.
History
Geeks love misty-eyed reminiscing about the great keyboards of yore, with a
rough consensus that the original IBM PC鈥檚 clackety high-travel product has
never since been surpassed. I sure liked that, but if my tactile memory is
right, the latest Apples may be better.
But that consensus is wrong anyhow, the IBM PC keyboards might not have
been surpassed since, but they never had quite the feel of the
old IBM Selectric typewriters.
I remember in particular when I was working on my
college newspaper; our single most
valuable asset was an IBM 鈥淛ustifying Selectric鈥; you鈥檇 bang text into it and
it鈥檇 buffer it up, a line at a time; when you got to the end of a line it
would justify it, let you approve it, and typeset it, justified in a
proportional font, onto the galleys.
It was fantastically expensive, thousands and thousands of dollars; this in
the early Seventies.
Of course, as well as all that magic it was a general-purpose ultra-high-end
typewriter
and when I needed to crank some work out and got into the flow I could make that
thing produce a steady dull roar, running north of 110 words per minute. Like
high-precision silk under the fingertips.
I remember one time when it broke and the IBM tech came by, I hung around
because I wanted to see how it worked. When he took the cover off I was
flabbergasted; the complexity inside was just mind-bending. There were
hundreds (at least) of moving parts, some the apparent thickness of a human
hair. How the thing ever worked, and how on earth he could repair it when
broken, escapes me. It remains the most visually-complex artifact I have ever
seen.