Analyzing The New Macbook Keyboard
Posted on December 20th, 2007
As some of you might have noticed: the new 4th generation Macbook has a new keyboard layout which looks much like their standalone keyboards. The keyboard is still the same floating-keys concept, but Apple moved around some buttons and deleted some others. As I had an old Macbook and now have a 4th generation Macbook, I thought it would be nice to quickly walk through some of the mayor changes.
First lets take a look at the 2 keyboards (top is a old european version, bottom is the new UK version):
1 - F-Keys Switcheroo
One of the most obvious and possibly most disturbing changes are the new F-keys. The previous Macbooks (and the iBooks and Powerbooks before) had the brightness and volume controls on the first few F-keys, followed by the num-lock and monitor-switcher. The last few keys were reserved for most of the Expose and Dashboard features, although they had the obvious design flaw of not being labeled and therefore rarely discovered.
In the new keyboard Apple tried to fix this flaw by assigning some icons to some of these features including Dashboard. But instead of keeping the buttons in the same position, they started to move them around. Dashboard is now not on F12 but on F4, “Show all windows” is now on F3 instead of F9. To make things worse they actually left out some of the functions like F11 (move all windows to show desktop) in order to have room for some extra buttons to control media playback.
Now, there are some notes here. First of all the media playback buttons are actually handy, though a bit redundant as every Macbook comes with a remote. Secondly, all the old functions are still available under the Fn key, but presseing Fn+F11 is not a very handy combo to do with one hand.
2 - Losing Useless Keys
The second thing Apple did was to get rid of a whole bunch of useless keys. First of all the entire num-pad has gone. Num-pads tend to only work if all 9 keys are aligned in a neat grid, but as they weren’t on a Macbook it made them pretty useless. As Macbooks aren’t used by administrative junkies anyway it seemed reasonable to drop the entire num-pad rather than thinking of some more elaborate solution.
Another thing that was removed is the key that nobody ever understood the function of, namely the smaller return key that used to be next to the right Command key. Instead they replaced it with a second Option key, which makes sense. I would have rather seen a second ctrl key there actually, so that you can switch Spaces with one hand (Ctrl+arrow).
Talking about the arrow keys: they look a bit cleaner! Removing the home, end, page up and page down functions made sense as most common people never use them, and all the others know how to find them anyway. I always thought they were a bit odd because it never stated properly what modifier key to use in combination with those arrows keys to get those functions. Is it Command or Option?
Finally it seems the screen output switcher key that used to be on F6 has been removed. That key was pretty handy for switching between dual screen and clone mode when connecting a Macbook to an external monitor or beamer. I have no idea if this button secretly still works with that function. Can anyone tell me?
3 - “Fixing” the Capslock
Finally, Apple decided to give the new Macbook keyboard the same feature as they gave their normal keyboards: anti-accidental-CapsLock-prevention. The idea here is that most people never use the CapsLock but most of the time accidentally hit it when they didn’t want to. To solve this Apple made sure that this new key doesn’t turn on the CapsLock if you tap it very quickly. Only when your really press it and hold it will it turn on. Reinier noted that this obviously isn’t a real fix, but more of a dirty hack. A proper solution would be to replace the CapsLock in its entirety with something far more useful. Maybe a left-side return key?
