Your pet peeve, technical or otherwise.

[AndyBeez]

"Your pet peeve, technical or otherwise" Entry #2150 ... Apple Keyboards!

Despite their sleek design and Apple price tag, in my opinion, the Apple keyboard is one of the worse keyboard designs in town.

This from a few days ago. On the outside this A1243 was a gleam machine - almost factory mint. On closer examination though, this keyboard had been around the block a few times. Thus it required a strip and clean. Which is where my issue with Apple's design is revealed. Keys sit over a key well, which holds a delicate plastic scissor mechanism, a rubber contact, and sometimes a metal spring; unfortunately the key well acts as miniature garbage sump.

From skin cells to fast food, everything accumulates in these key wells. Over time, a biological record of the keyboard's life builds up as a layer of congealed sediment under the keys. Regardless of how clean and sanitised the keyboard is on the outside, a biological rubbish dump is lurking just under the fingertips. At some point, the debris can lock up the scissor mechanism, causing the infamous stuck key.

Of course, being an Apple product, keyboards cannot be dismantled like a PC keyboard with a screw driver and spudger. On a canteen wall in Cupertino California a neon sign must read, "screws are just not cool". Instead, to get at the key well, you have to pop each of the 102+ keycaps, which are held in place by Apple's own unique and obscurated engineering style. Styles, plural.

This A1243 keyboard is a venerable cocktail of human gloop, fluff, dog hair or eye lashes and, glitter! Okay, this is a bad one, but the problem with Apple keyboards is they will trap everything in the key well. Dust, crumbs, dirt, soot, drinks and all kinds of human fluids will fall in, mix and solidify. Only IPA and time can revitalise a gloop monster. Otherwise that's another $199 for a new clean one. Thinks, in sterile environments are Apple keyboards safe?


* Tip: When removing keytops, only ever use a plastic pry tool. Never use a metal pry tool, knife blade or flat screwdriver (as shown on many YouTube videos), as these will eventually break through the plastic scissor mechanism, indent the plastic key or, nitch the surrounding aluminium frame. It's Apple, so it's not meant to be easy.

[IDEngineer]

As a keyboard Design Engineer in a former life, I have to say that's the grossest example of keyboard detritus I've ever seen. And trust me, I saw a LOT back in the day because we had "failed" keyboards shipped back for analysis.

Did this come from the factory where they make Cheetos?

[AndyBeez]

As a keyboard Design Engineer in a former life, I have to say that's the grossest example of keyboard detritus I've ever seen. And trust me, I saw a LOT back in the day because we had "failed" keyboards shipped back for analysis.

Did this come from the factory where they make Cheetos?

Cheetos no, but I did detect a slight hint of Chinese restuarant. Which might explain the glitter and eye lashes.

My beef with Apple is how the hell can they design such a premium product with an ingress rating of minus zero? It's a similar story with MacBook keyboards. How many customers have gone to the Genius Bar with a stuck key only to be told by a 'genius' that their device cannot be fixed?

Only on screen iPad keyboards are 100% wipe clean

[james_s]

As a keyboard Design Engineer in a former life, I have to say that's the grossest example of keyboard detritus I've ever seen. And trust me, I saw a LOT back in the day because we had "failed" keyboards shipped back for analysis.

Did this come from the factory where they make Cheetos?

Having one of these myself as my work laptop, I think the issue is that the space under the keys is so small that it doesn't take much volume of dust and crumbs to fill it up and stuff that gets in is harder to get out than with a more conventional keyboard. The keyboard really is garbage, it's incredibly noisy to type on and it clogs very easily.

[SiliconWizard]

Those flat keyboards should be put to death anyway (just like the fricking flat UI stuff.)

Holy crap, is those guys' world flat or what is it?

[IDEngineer]

It's a classic example of one design goal being pursued too far, causing excessive suboptimization elsewhere. The laptop world uses "thinness" as a criteria of such overwhelming importance that other things, like proper keyboard design that is actually good to, you know, TYPE on, get jettisoned in the mad dash to be "the thinnest ever".

Me, I use a laptop that is thicker than the "thinnest" but has every physical port type you can get in a single box. That way I'm prepared when I walk into some lab or shop and need to connect to whatever. I don't have to carry a dozen dongles or adapters, because I probably have the native port. In trade for this flexibility I have to suffer the indignity of not having a paper thin laptop and enduring the friendly ribbing of my son and his 20-something friends.

Worth it.

Your optimization may vary.

EDIT: Oh yeah, I also have enough thickness to enjoy a very nice keyboard (for a laptop, anyway).

[rsjsouza]

Indeed flat keyboards are a pain to be used, although my wife loves her decade-old Toshiba z935-P300 (I have no idea why) which, despite being a notebook as thin and light as the ones of the modern variety, accumulates a lot less crud under its keys.

I really liked the older Toshiba keyboards (around 2005~2006) which, together with Dells of the turn of the century, still had curved keys that gave me a lot of typing precision.

[james_s]

It's a classic example of one design goal being pursued too far, causing excessive suboptimization elsewhere. The laptop world uses "thinness" as a criteria of such overwhelming importance that other things, like proper keyboard design that is actually good to, you know, TYPE on, get jettisoned in the mad dash to be "the thinnest ever".

Me, I use a laptop that is thicker than the "thinnest" but has every physical port type you can get in a single box. That way I'm prepared when I walk into some lab or shop and need to connect to whatever. I don't have to carry a dozen dongles or adapters, because I probably have the native port. In trade for this flexibility I have to suffer the indignity of not having a paper thin laptop and enduring the friendly ribbing of my son and his 20-something friends.

Worth it.

Your optimization may vary.

EDIT: Oh yeah, I also have enough thickness to enjoy a very nice keyboard (for a laptop, anyway).

That has been my thought all along. It sacrifices too much in order to be thinner than it needs to be. It's so thin that it's uncomfortable to hold on edge in my hand, there is no reason for it to be that thin, with an extra 5mm it could probably fit a large enough battery to last a whole work day and maybe a better keyboard. The thing that bugs me even more than the thinness race is the obsession with thin bezels on phone and laptop displays. I simply don't understand the importance placed on having little or no bezel, to the absurd extreme of having notches or holes cut out of the display. It makes no sense at all to me, I would much prefer to have a bezel around a solid, uninterrupted display than to cut out part of the display, especially when it's for a feature I don't even want like a front facing camera. I have never once intentionally turned on the front facing camera on a phone.

[SpacedCowboy]

First up, full disclosure. I work at Apple, have done for what is now approaching decades. Judge any bias as thou wilt.

The pursuit of razor-thin-laptops-über-alles is over, folks, it left the building together with a certain Mr. Ive. I have one of the new (well, ish) M1-Max MBP’s and it’s a chunky boy. The keyboard is, not un-coincidentally, rather nice too, and doesn’t suffer from the above-discussed scissor mechanism, AFAIK.

The screen “notch” is not a notch out of the usual visible screen at all, BTW. There are more pixels, over and above the normal resolution, to each side of the camera. This gives extra screen real-estate to either side of the camera, and the menu-bar generally fits to the left. I get that it’s a visual look that may take some getting used to, and that the UX for extra-long menu-bars could probably be improved, but personally it took me hours to accept it as the new norm. I don’t even notice it now.

As for battery life, I recently took that laptop on a 2-week vacation traveling down the California coast to Disneyland  and back (kids, watchyagonnado…) and forgot the charging cable in the packing debacle. I used the laptop pretty much every night, we streamed a movie on one night. By the end of the two weeks it had lost 50% or so of its battery… Now clearly it wasn’t in use all day, every day, but I’ve done that before as well, the thing *sips* battery like it’s never going to be charged again.

I won’t go into cameras apart from to say that the vast majority of people use the cameras (both front and back) on their cellphones, they’re an ever-increasing part of the cellphone “must have” criteria. I use the front camera on mine at least once per week to face-time my parents who live 6000 miles away. They get to see their grandkids, I get to see my niece, and that’s awesome.

I will agree that the port situation on an MBP isn’t optimal for engineers, especially mobile ones. I don’t take a slew of dongles or adapters with me, though, I take a thunderbolt hub - it has everything you’d find on any other laptop and more besides, is bus-powered so there’s no external PSU, is relatively compact, and since I usually carry my laptop in a bag when I go anywhere, it isn’t any less convenient to take. In fact it stays in the bag because that’s the only time I need it.

None of which is to say that any of this means “you ought to like it too”, everyone is different, everyone has opinions, and for each individual, they are perfectly entitled to dislike X or Y about something they’ve bought. Manufacturers, however, have to choose ahead of time - engineering is the art of compromise and different people will have different reactions to the trade-offs made; a long and roundabout way of saying YMMV

[PlainName]

The screen “notch” is not a notch out of the usual visible screen at all, BTW.

My beef with that kind of thing is not that it's a notch (I appreciate the extra pixels) but that there is little to no bezel. You can't pick up a live phone without triggering something because a finger will be on a live part of the screen. With a bezel there is room for your fingers to no be pressing anything.

[SpacedCowboy]

… rather similar to people in the UK calling a moving van a "Pantechnicon".

As a Brit, and having lived in several regions of the UK, I have never once heard a moving van to be called a pantechnicon.  Not once. I’ve heard “the movers” if it’s a third party doing the moving, “a lorry”, or the 99% case “a moving van”.

I fear you may have been misled, perchance in pursuit of a jape, but unless you happened to be conversing with the right honourable Jacob Rees-Mogg MP, I fear the only citizenry sufficiently lexiphanic to use such a term would also refer to the common double-decker red vehicular conveyance as an omnibus, a spade as an earth-inverting horticultural instrument,  or a child’s carriage as a perambulator. These people are not commonplace…

[james_s]

None of which is to say that any of this means “you ought to like it too”, everyone is different, everyone has opinions, and for each individual, they are perfectly entitled to dislike X or Y about something they’ve bought. Manufacturers, however, have to choose ahead of time - engineering is the art of compromise and different people will have different reactions to the trade-offs made; a long and roundabout way of saying YMMV

I wouldn't care, except that everybody copies Apple, so when there's some stupid idea like a notch out of the screen, pretty soon every other flagship and a lot of cheap stuff too has copied the notch. Perhaps I'm a bit OCD but I find any kind of notch simply intolerable. I don't care that there are extra pixels, there's a chunk out of one of the edges that is unusable and it is extremely distracting. I guess that's great if most people can tune it out, I've seen loads of people watching TV blissfully unaware or not caring that there's a smudge of something on the screen or those irritating channel logos floating in the corner, or the color is off and people's faces are pink, they seem to adjust to that and not care, I can't, to me it makes it unwatchable.

[IDEngineer]

I’ve heard “a lorry”... common double-decker red vehicular conveyance as an omnibus... a spade as an earth-inverting horticultural instrument... a child’s carriage as a perambulator.

I actually use all of those terms, and I'm a born-and-raised Yankee! Also, "pram" is much more common than "perambulator" even though "pram" aren't the first four letters of the full word.

I suspect my copious consumption of works by PG Wodehouse may have had something to do with this.

[SpacedCowboy]

"pram" is very commonplace, in fact I had to adjust to "stroller" when I came over to the US. Perambulator, not so much

[SiliconWizard]

Those very thin laptops - they may look great indeed while the lid is closed - but once the lid is open and you're going to use them, then not only you won't see the difference, but yes, the compromises to make them this thin are inconvenient. In other words, it's like those products are optimized for when they are actually not being used, and for photographs.

Who cares about 5mm thicker when the laptop is in your bag, or when it is open on your desktop?

[PlainName]

Who cares about 5mm thicker when the laptop is in your bag, or when it is open on your desktop?

I think I might because of the keyboard. If it were like a normal keyboard, with the edge right by the space bar, it would no problem, but when the keys are set back 6" or more that 5mm step can play havoc with your wrists.

Of course, nowadays you need to put a touchpad in there, but I don't know why that isn't placed above the keyboard instead of below.

[james_s]

I think a touchpad above the keyboard would be awful from an ergonomic standpoint. I can use a touchpad with my thumbs without moving my hands off the keyboard but if the touchpad were above it I would have to reach up over the keyboard to use it. I don't like the trend of touchpads being so huge these days though, I end up using only a small portion down in the corner of one and I always have to crank the sensitivity up all the way to max for it to feel even close to responsive enough.

[MrMobodies]

One thing I always turn off is "tap to cliick", gestures or anything that interprets me touching it as a set of unwanted actions. Many of my friends and past customers brought in mouses with their laptop saying the difficulty they have using them but with a quite a few of them as soon as I turned that stuff of and make a few adjustments to the speed and acceleration they seem to like it.

Now I see they merged the buttons into the touchpad and not all of them have that "touch zone"? or filters to stop it moving on the areas designated as buttons as that seems to cancel out what I am doing on the slightest movement there.

[SilverSolder]

I think a touchpad above the keyboard would be awful from an ergonomic standpoint. I can use a touchpad with my thumbs without moving my hands off the keyboard but if the touchpad were above it I would have to reach up over the keyboard to use it. I don't like the trend of touchpads being so huge these days though, I end up using only a small portion down in the corner of one and I always have to crank the sensitivity up all the way to max for it to feel even close to responsive enough.

I prefer the smaller touchpads as well...  -  or, a separate mouse.   Easy enough to bring a small wireless mouse along with the laptop...

[themadhippy]

nowadays you need to put a touchpad in there, but I don't know why that isn't placed above the keyboard instead of below

Best design i used was an old 486 elonex (i think)  laptop were the track ball  was to the right  of the screen and the 2 buttons behind it on the lid.  It also had its own built in psu so no  external brick,just a bog standard fig 8 lead

[PlainName]

I can use a touchpad with my thumbs without moving my hands off the keyboard but if the touchpad were above it I would have to reach up over the keyboard to use it.

I think it probably depends on what you're used to and what work you do. I am more keyboard-centric, but if I happen to be in moving pointer mode I find the pad pretty poor compared to a BT mouse I always have with  the laptop. So in my case the pad is mostly getting in the way because I'm not using it. The few times I would need to use it wouldn't be a big problem.

But... some people swear by the IBM tit, which I have never found at all usable. I'd rather use the cursor keys 

I am pretty sure I once had a laptop which had a pop-out mouse. It was attached by a thin rod which both supported it and provided movement info (there was no LED or ball or anything). Can't remember if it was very usable, though.

Edit: the Omnibook

[IDEngineer]

But... some people swear by the IBM tit, which I have never found at all usable. I'd rather use the cursor keys 

If you mean the "eraserhead" or "thumbstick", yeah - those are an abomination. We did extensive studies on them vs. other pointing devices and they are uniquely awful because they function completely differently from everything else.

Mice, trackpads, trackballs, styluses, etc. all translate your motion to motion of the cursor on the screen. Sometimes there's acceleration or other effects but the bottom line is motion in, motion out.

In stark contrast, the IBM/Toshiba/Lenovo eraserhead acts more like a switch, or cursor keys. You are inputting direction data, not motion data. You tilt it in a direction and the cursor moves that way - with no further motion of the input device! It too can have acceleration effects and such, but unlike virtually every other input device the cursor motion will continue even if you are not moving the input device further.

The motion-for-motion relationship is extremely intuitive. Most people become competent in mere minutes. There is an obvious relationship and your eyes+brain easily, naturally, inherently close the loop.

But the eraserhead's behavior is not intuitive. It's like cursor keys stuck on autorepeat. Activate it, and motion continues until you release. There is no physiological connection between YOUR motion and the cursor motion. You stopped moving, but the cursor kept right on going. This leads to frequent overshoots/undershoots, repeated corrections instead of "hitting the target" the first time, and user frustration.

I do understand that some people like eraserheads. To each his own. But with many years of human interface design in my background I have, do, and will ALWAYS discourage including them in any design. If people like them they should buy one as a USB or Bluetooth accessory so the vast majority of people aren't saddled with them.

As for touchpads on laptops... yep, I too disable "tap to click" immediately. Just way too many opportunities for mistakes caused by heels or palms of hands brushing the touchpad and being misinterpreted. Frankly, touchpads are little more than a necessary evil and should be kept pretty small to avoid unintentional input that often goes unnoticed until you find you've been editing in a completely wrong section of the file because you brushed the pad and thus moved the cursor while you were typing. Thank goodness for Ctrl-Z and autorepeat when that happens! My solution is to disable the touchpad and carry a Bluetooth micromouse. I buy neoprene laptop cases with a zipped pocket specifically to have a place to carry that mouse.

EDIT: I also carry a paper-thin dedicated mousepad since optical mice often have trouble with various tabletop surfaces. I get one whose size roughly matches the keyboard, and I store it on top of the keyboard when the laptop is closed. This protects the screen from getting a "keyboard imprint" caused by the keytops gently scrubbing against the screen surface during transport. Take a look at a few laptops with the light at an angle... very often there's an array of scrubbed little boxes all over the screen caused by the keys rubbing. The thin mousepad solves two problems and weighs nearly nothing.

[james_s]

If you mean the "eraserhead" or "thumbstick", yeah - those are an abomination. We did extensive studies on them vs. other pointing devices and they are uniquely awful because they function completely differently from everything else.

Back in the early 2000's I had an older Toshiba (I think) laptop with a clit mouse and it actually worked really well. My later Lenovos have it and on those I don't think it works nearly as well although some people still love it. I'm not bothered by it being there, I just rarely use it. There are occasions when it has been handy though, like when the end of my finger is sore from extensive touchpad use.

[CatalinaWOW]

The eraser head is a terrible solution that is better than the alternative touchpad. The eraserheads I have used aren't just on/off, but move the cursor at a rate that is force dependent.  Takes training, but most people need to learning mouse and finger stroke stuff(and touch typing too for that matter.) 

Whenever possible I use a small travel mouse, but that doesn't work in a coach airplane seat or other cramped situations.

[vk6zgo]

… rather similar to people in the UK calling a moving van a "Pantechnicon".

As a Brit, and having lived in several regions of the UK, I have never once heard a moving van to be called a pantechnicon.  Not once. I’ve heard “the movers” if it’s a third party doing the moving, “a lorry”, or the 99% case “a moving van”.

I fear you may have been misled, perchance in pursuit of a jape, but unless you happened to be conversing with the right honourable Jacob Rees-Mogg MP, I fear the only citizenry sufficiently lexiphanic to use such a term would also refer to the common double-decker red vehicular conveyance as an omnibus, a spade as an earth-inverting horticultural instrument,  or a child’s carriage as a perambulator. These people are not commonplace…

Whatever!
Last time I visited the UK was 1974----a lifetime ago.
I definitely remember references to "Pantechs" in the local "rag" in Southampton, & in the "Yellow Pages" of the Phone book.

Strangely enough, the word doesn't come up in casual conversation, any more than "campus" does if talking to an American.
"Lorries" instead of "Trucks", "Artics" for "Semitrailers", did come up, as did "Motor" for "Car".