Keyboard Nerdery

Apple's Bluetooth Keyboard

While writing a pair of long papers a couple years ago, I tired of my (beloved) 12″ Powerbook’s tiny keyboard and decided to buy an external keyboard. (Of course, this may have doubled as a perfect way to procrastinate on writing said papers… but you can’t prove nothin’.) Anywho, I started doing some research and was quickly, amazingly, disappointed.

I wanted an inexpensive, simple, full-size keyboard, preferably Bluetooth or at least wireless, that had a fairly small footprint and that worked as an Apple keyboard by default (without needing to switch keys around to match the Command key in place of the Windows key, or any other silliness). I didn’t like the keyboards Apple was selling at the time, and most of the “made for Macs” keyboards manufactured by third parties received poor reviews. Looking at the Windows side, most of the keyboards were huge, bloated monstrosities with all sorts of extra buttons for controlling volume and video games and hitting fast-forward in music players and other junk that I didn’t want and that, in addition, made things worse by greatly increasing the size of the keyboard.

It was as though no one was interested in just making a solid, clean, simple keyboard and selling it at a reasonable price. Sure, some companies sold updated versions of the beloved, clicky IBM keyboards, and others sold tiny “hacker” keyboards or expensive tweakable keyboards, but none of them were available for under $60 (and as for a ceiling, the sky’s the limit). My solution? I went to Office Max and bought the most basic keyboard I could find. $15, and it’s been great – especially for the price. Not exactly what I wanted… still it gets the job done.

But then Apple redeisgned their keyboards. Such hope! Sure, the chiclet-esque keyboards looked a little strange, but wow, the Bluetooth model is purty. Still, something wasn’t quite right. The wired (and less expensive) model is just too big, and the Bluetooth model, though nice and small, is pricey and is just missing too many keys that I want in a keyboard.

Today John Gruber linked to an article that hit the nail on the head. Apple, make this happen:

The smaller one (really a lot smaller) squeezes tiny arrow keys into a corner, has an ultra-miniature “control” key, gives “fn” the prized bottom-left-corner position, and entirely omits those other useful keys.

There are several design flaws here. First, people who need an extra numeric keypad really need it, but there’s a huge number of us for whom they’re a waste of precious desktop space. Second, the idea that whether or not you need certain keys is related to whether you want to connect with a wire or not seems spurious. Third, the notion that any outboard keyboard should omit page up/down, home/end, delete, and so on, is just wrong.

So, I want keyboards that can be ordered in either USB and Bluetooth, and either with or without the numeric cluster, but always have the first outboard cluster.