The new Apple keyboards - love ‘em or hate ‘em
September 24, 2007
A post by Fake Steve Jobs led me to Jason D. O’Grady over at ZDNet who has blogged about how much he hates the new Apple keyboards. I bought one when they came out to try it out and since then I have replaced they keyboards on all my Macs with the new ones.
It seems that the feel and design is something you either love or hate. I really love the low-profile light touch on the keys. I am a programmer and I use my keyboard probably 10 hours a day. Whenever I use an old-style keyboard now all I can think is how clunky and heavy it feels. It feels like I’m using an original IBM PC keyboard. Interestingly, my Mac Book Pro keyboard, which always used to feel light, now feels quite solid and I actually enjoy using it more now that I’m using the new desktop keyboards.
I don’t mind that Jason doesn’t like them. It really comes down to a matte of taste. His other objections centre around the design and here I think he is on shakier ground. I love the low-throw of the keys. They give enough click sound to give me the feedback I need without the tactile feedback. And objections to the change in the location of they various function keys are really just complaints about change. Millions of new Mac users in the coming year will never care about that and it’s something that most people can easily adapt to.
But most importantly, the keyboard and mouse are two of the most easily replaceable components on a computer. Okay, there may not be as many Mac-specific keyboards on the market as there are for PCs, but there are still plenty to choose from, so if you don’t like the one that Apple puts in the box then go get another one. Personally, although I love the design of the Mighty Mouse, I don’t really like using it so I use a Microsoft Intellimouse (actually, I’ve always felt that MS were a far better at hardware than software) which, of course, works fine.
I agree that it would be nice to see a full-sized bluetooth keyboard, but I’m still looking forward to receiving the cut-down one when it finally ships to me here in the UK.
My point in all of this is that I’m fine with Jason hating the new keyboard, but please don’t try and justify it with opinions dressed up as objective design complaints. There’s far too much of that already in the world.
I’m a big fan of the new keyboard, love it, much faster to type on and much less typos! Today my little macbook went in for an MOT and I had to use the G4 AL book all day and I found it a real pain in the bum to type on. (although the 15 inch screen was nice:). I ditched the mighty mouse as well, mice is about the one thing that microsoft do well, I love my MS Laser6000!
As for opinions dressed up as objective design complaints, yep I’m sick of those kind of cheap comments as well!
Comment by Jason Jarrett — February 4, 2008 @ 9:39 pm
Fully agree on the mouse. I use Intellimouse Opticals where I can. I like the extra buttons for forward and back in the browser. Microsoft have always been a far better at hardware than software.
Comment by Doug Clinton — February 5, 2008 @ 6:04 pm
I’m quite happy with the slim mac keyboard. I’ve seen some ranting about the function keys being hidden behind the fn button, and usurped by things like brightness and volume control. I don’t mind that actually, and as a true-mac head , I despise function keys a la PC world - “simply press shift-F11 to do blah blah” That stuff seems so non-mac. I’m happy with cmd-x or cmd-v etc, as they are in the normal finger range of a touch-typing programmer type.
ross
Comment by Ross — April 11, 2008 @ 8:02 pm