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Laptop Keyboard Tiny Keys

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gnuarm:
<rant mode on>I get that PCs are GUI oriented devices, but keyboards are still an important part of using them.  It seems that over the last decade the keyboards on laptops have been sacrificing the key sizes for no apparent reason.  This is on 17 inch laptops where the overall outline of the keyboard is some two or three inches smaller than the laptop as a whole, so it's not about fitting into the machine in any way.

It started with shrinking the function keys along the top row of the keyboard.  They are used less often, so I guess they figured they are not so important. 

Then they made the arrow keys smaller.  I think the designers were going for a "look" that is sleeker and symmetrical.  They wanted to shove the cross arrangement of arrow keys up into the outline of the keyboard.  That was fine as long as they made room for the actual keys, but at some point they started to make the up and down arrow keys half height so the two fit in one key outline.  I've even seen some that make all four keys the same height leaving extra space above the stunted left and right arrow keys. 

Then I realized they have also been shrinking the width of the numeric keypad keys.  That is more subtle at approximately 3/4 width or maybe 2/3 width.  More recently I've seen them drop the entire numeric keypad entirely leaving 5 or 6 inches of unused space on the sides of the keyboard. 

WTF?  :-//

The last laptop I bought was a Dell Precision M6800, a rather expensive machine new, but bought used at a decent price.  Even this machine has 3/4 size arrow and other keys.  But it is actually wearing out and is a hot bastard!  I've been looking for a new machine for over a year and no one has the full set of features I want, a graphics chip (not built into the CPU), 32 GB of RAM, a 17 inch display and a decent keyboard.  Some of the Asian brands get close, but they always crap out on the keyboard either with small keys or leaving off or making hard to access some of the navigation keys.  They will have a key primary function "SysRq" and the shifted function "Home".  WTF? <rant mode off>

Is this just me?  Do I need to get over it and just live with the crap they sell? 

Oh yeah, almost forgot... don't get me started about merging the touch pad keys into the touch pad.  Grrrr...  |O

Benta:
I've gone the other way, for the same reasons you describe.
My laptops are all (3 pcs.) HP/Compaqs of 2008...2010 vintage.
The keyboards are full-size and very tactile.

Now, Win 10 is not an option here. They're all installed with Lubuntu 20.04 and are waaay faster than my 2 year old Win 10 machine (Lubuntu cold boot: 25 s, shut down 2 s).

I understand your rant, keyboards on modern laptops is design over function.

PS: a 6910p or 8530w cost 50...80 $ on ebay.

gnuarm:
Thanks for the moral support.   The machines you list might be fine for many things, but I run simulations and other CPU and memory intensive programs so that such an old machine would not work for me.  I don't think FPGA or analog simulations run any faster on different operating systems.  Or I should say any slower.  They all run slow, it's just a matter of how slow.

I guess I could dedicate a decent desktop to running simulations and such leaving the laptop as a console. 

bd139:
Buy a thinkpad. best laptop keyboard out there and arguably a good keyboard on its own.

It's got all the right keys, none of them are shifted or FN'ed or overlayed other than the media keys, everything is discoverable, they all have exactly the same actuation force, grouping is spot on.

My T495:

gnuarm:
Thanks for the suggestion, but I don't see a numeric keypad at all on that one.  I've looked at Thinkpads.  But they have gone over to the dark side as well in the newer models like Dell.  That's why I'm typing on an 8 year old M6800.

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