An epic keyboard rant
From Peter Bright writing at
Ars Technica:
Stop trying to innovate keyboards. You�re just making them worse
I've written about my struggles to find a good PC laptop before. After literally years of searching, it looks like Lenovo has stepped up to the plate and finally created the machine I crave. The new ThinkPad X1 Carbon, a high-resolution, Haswell-equipped update to 2012's Ivy Bridge-based model looked just about perfect.
The machine looks glorious in just about every regard. Fully decked out, it has a 2.1-3.3 GHz two core, four thread Core i7-4600U processor, 8GB RAM, a 14-inch 2560�1440 multitouch screen, 801.11ac, 9 hours of battery life, and a fingerprint reader. It all weighs in at under 3 lbs. It's a sleek, good-looking machine, and I'd buy one in an instant...
... if it weren't for one thing. The new X1 Carbon has what Lenovo is calling an "Adaptive Keyboard."
Peter then goes on to enumerate the problems with the keyboard.
They buggered up the function keys, removed the CAPS LOCK key and moved the Home and End keys there in its place and they broke up the
Delete, Insert, Home, End, Page Up, and Page Down block and scattered them around. The Escape key was moved to where the (~`) key is. For a touch typist, it is unusable.
The 200+ comments are a fun read.
Posted by DaveH at January 18, 2014 2:12 PM