I Already Googled It

One of my pet peeves is Apple.

Not any particular product that they make, just their corporate ethos in general.

Therefore you can imagine that it bothers me when people go ahead and buy MacBooks, without really giving serious consideration to what they’re actually buying.

I don’t really understand what the allure of MacBooks is.  Is it the shiny brushed aluminium body?  You can get that from HP in their EliteBook line.  Is it the terrible UNIX-inspired OS with minimal compatibility?  Why not just use Windows which actually “just works“?  Or maybe it’s the lack of a user-replaceable battery?  The absence of DVI and HDMI in favour of the widely-unsupported DisplayPort?

I could go on for a while—and probably will, in later blog posts (aren’t you excited?)—but the point is, is that I don’t think most people buying MacBooks actually think about what they’re throwing away their hard-earned money on.

I would rant about that—them throwing their money away—but then I’d have to tag this post “Randian” and possibly “Libertarianism“ as well and that wasn’t what I was aiming for.

However, I could be mis-judging, and everyone who buys a MacBook really needs to use Final Cut Pro.  Or maybe they legitimately buy into the ridiculous notion that the Mac is better for graphics design (Adobe makes the Creative Suite for Windows too…).

Anyway, my “[c]ompelling [r]eason [n]ot to [b]uy a MacBook” is none of the things cited above—that was just a warm up/vent. What I actually wanted to talk about was the MacBook keyboard:

A lot of you are probably thinking that I’m off my rocker, that the MacBook keyboard is the best part of the MacBook, et cetera, but hear me out—I know what I’m talking about when it comes to keyboards.

Sure, the chiclet design is great, but you can just get that in an HP ProBook and a bunch of other Windows laptops if you want that.  The problems with this keyboard are:

• Why is “fn” outside of “control“?  Did Steve Jobs decide that having CTRL/”control” on the outside—where everyone is used to it—was too conformist?
• Speaking of CTRL/”control“, don’t keyboards have a left and right CTRL?
• Why is “option” outside of “command“?  See above.
• Why are the up and down arrow keys so tiny?
• Why is BACKSPACE labelled as “delete“?  See my conformist critique again.
• Speaking of DELETE, where is it?
• Where are HOME, END, PAGE UP, and PAGE DOWN?

These aren’t just cosmetic complaints, or complaints about having to break and remake habits (which is bad HCI anyway Mr. Jobs).  There’s a reason that there’s a gap between CTRL and ALT on a regular keyboard.  Go and hold down WIN and CTRL (which are side-by-side), and now CTRL and ALT.  Which is more comfortable?  That aside, what about CTRL+A?  Try holding WIN+A (which is comparable to CTRL+A on the MacBook keyboard), not as comfortable, is it?

Then there’s the matter of the missing keys—to be comprehensive, the list is: HOME, END, PAGE UP, PAGE DOWN, INSERT, DELETE, PRINT SCREEN, SCROLL LOCK, and PAUSE—where did they go?  Admittedly, at least two of those keys (I’m thinking SCROLL LOCK and INSERT here) aren’t very useful, but what about the others?  How do you do serious text editing without HOME, END, and DELETE?  I’ve Googled it, and there are replacement keyboard shortcuts (COMMAND+RIGHT ARROW=END), but these are nowhere near as convenient.  When you want to select a full line of text, you go to the beginning of it (HOME), then select (hold SHIFT), and then go to the end (END) and remove it (DELETE or BACKSPACE).  With your MacBook, you have at least two more keystrokes which have to be made with the same hand that’s holding SHIFT (or with the hand that’s stroking the arrow keys).  As an added bonus, the arrow keys that you have to use to execute these useful text editing commands are tiny.  These keys were put on the keyboard for good reason, replacing them with two keystrokes just makes life more complicated.

Which leads nicely into a long-standing complaint I have about the Mac world: When you want to do something simple with Mac, it’s usually easier than it is on any other platform, but as soon as you want to do serious work, your life just becomes much more complicated, since, to make the simpler things simpler, they had to take and hide the more complex functionality.

The above picture is the keyboard used on all MacBooks—even the 17″ ones—below I’ve included a picture of the keyboard from my 12.1″ HP EliteBook 2740p tablet, for comparison:

Whoa look at that!  A CTRL key I can comfortably hit alongside A!  Arrow keys that aren’t ridiculously small!  HOME, END, and DELETE, my old friends!  A properly labelled BACKSPACE key!

Just because I enjoy kicking Macs when they’re already down, I mentioned that the Mac keyboard pictured above was the keyboard for all MacBooks, specifically mentioning that the 17″ model was included in that statement.  This wasn’t a mistake.

Where am I going with this?

The 17″ MacBook doesn’t have a numberpad!

This person has the correct idea: