maniacal rage

When I went to the Apple Store today, I planned to pick up the new versions of iLife and iWork, as well as a new keyboard. For the past year I have been using (and loving) the Macally iceKey—with its laptop-depth keys it reduces strain on my fingers and I've never been more comfortable typing in years, but its non-Apple-standard key sizes and one blank key¹ drive me nuts on a regular basis. So when I heard Apple was releasing a laptop-depth keyboard I was thrilled.

Turns out they didn't have them in stock today in stores. But I did get to play with one, and I found some very strange things.

First, Apple has decided that the wired version of the keyboard should be full size, but the Bluetooth version isn't. It's missing the delete, insert, home, et cetera island, and the number pad. In fact, the Bluetooth version looks exactly like the MacBook keyboard, but with aluminum backing. The wired version has the whole keyboard layout. I'm not sure why they decided on this, and I don't think I agree with it. Sure, making the BT version smaller makes it more portable, but I don't think people are moving them around quite enough that it's worth shorting them the ability to input numbers conveniently.

Second, and far stranger, is the new layout of function (or F) keys. The wired keyboard now has up to F19, and no dedicated volume controls. Instead, it moves the volume controls to special functions on F10, F11 and F12. You might remember those as two Expose keys and the Dashboard key. Well, not anymore. In fact, F9, the other default Expose key, is now fast-forward/next track. And the eject key, which has nearly always been the last key in the upper right of the keyboard is next to F12. Not on the end in the wired version. But it gets even stranger:

The F3 key's special function is Expose: All windows. F3? Are they serious? F4 is Dashboard. Since when are F3 and F4 easy to hit keys? They're in no-man's land up there. And are we just supposed to stop using any other Expose functionality? There are no keys with the other two functions. And, while we're at it, I should mention that the volume controls have been changed, order-wise, from the usual desktop keyboard layout. It used to be volume down, volume up, mute. Now it matches the laptop arrangement, which swaps mute to the left instead of the right.

And here's where it gets fun: you can, much like on a laptop, disable the special functionality of the keys and switch to regular function key use using System Preferences, after which you can assign things to the keys you wish. That is, except the volume keys. Because when you turn off the special functions, there is no way to bind the volume keys to, say, the F16-18 keys which are useless on the keyboard otherwise. So if you want to use the keyboard the way you're used to, you won't be able to control volume without holding the "fn" key, which allows you to use the special functions temporarily when they're disabled.

So why did Apple make all of these random changes? Truthfully, I'm not sure. The new keyboard looks like it was meant to be a laptop keyboard (it functions nearly identically to the current MB and MBP boards), which doesn't make much sense. How frequently are people adjusting brightness (dedicated special function keys F1 and F2) on a desktop? I'd guess very rarely.

All this aside, the keys are really quite nice to type on and I still plan to order one for the sake of my fingers. But I'm going to have to figure out a way to bind the keys the way I want them—that is, to have them work the way the desktop keyboards have worked for years.