Stop Trying To 'Innovate' Keyboards, You're Just Making Them Worse

FuzzNugget writes "Peter Bright brings the hammer down on the increasing absurdities of laptop keyboard design, from the frustrating to the downright asinine, like the 'adaptive keyboard' of the new Lenovo X1 Carbon. He says, 'The X1's Adaptive Keyboard may have a superior layout to a regular keyboard (I don't think that it does, but for the sake of argument, let's pretend that it does), but that doesn't matter. As long as I have to use regular keyboard layouts too, the Adaptive Keyboard will be at a huge disadvantage. Every time I use another computer, I'll have to switch to the conventional layout. The standard layout has tremendous momentum behind it, and unless purveyors of new designs are able to engineer widespread industry support—as Microsoft did with the Windows keys, for example—then their innovations are doomed to being annoyances rather than improvements.' When will laptop manufacturers focus on perfecting a standardized design rather than trying to reinvent the wheel with every new generation?"

Comments

Windows keys?

[guruevi]

The "Windows key" location existed before on other systems, it was called the "meta" key. Apple had the Apple logo in that place, Sun keyboards had the diamond logo, even the Symbolics machines had the key well before Microsoft even talked about ripping off DOS.

And what about REISUB?

[nicomede]

As a Linux user it's sometimes necessary to cleanly reboot the machine through the Kernel call Alt+PrintScreen+ REISUB, I don't see how to do that on this laptop?

Re:Isn't just the keyboards

[Hamsterdan]

But unless it's IPS, rotating an LCD will shift colors because the viewing angles aren't the same for horizontal vs vertical. It also messes up font smoothing since the order of sub-pixels isn't the same (unless the OS is aware of that)

Still won't work for a laptop

Re:"AN quality monitor"

[Immerman]

Probably because I modified the original phrasing and failed to update the article preceding it.