Epitaph to Laptops

I guess some people can train their muscle memory quicker than others, as I've found myself to accommodate to changes in keyboard layouts quite fast. I also like the island-style keyboards on newer Thinkpads nicer to write on, clickier and more precise compared to older keyboards. I have X220 and T470 to compare.

Recently I've made the switch to Macbook Air, and while initially I missed some keys and the keyboard felt shallow, now it feels quite good and nice to type on.

Also, I'd take the Macbook any moment over the above Thinkpads, just because it will last a day without charger, and is faster and lighter.

This makes me wish that I still had one of the classic old laptops around just to see what they keyboard felt like. I have a ThinkPad X1 Extreme and a new M1 Macbook Pro and I like both keyboards - but I wonder if that is just because they were such an improvement over the 2016-2019-era MBPs that I've forgotten how good laptop keyboards used to be.

That said, I am sure I've also forgotten just how thick and heavy/bulky those laptops used to be to allow for that level of key travel and upgradability/extensibility.

What I hate the most about modern laptops is not the keyboard layout but the key travel depth. Lenovo was doing alright there but is also slowly eating away at it. The ThinkPad T490s has 1.8mm, the T14s gen2 has 1.5. the T470 had even more than 1.8 as I recall.

Apple has set an annoying trend with their MacBook butterfly keyboard and even though they reverted back the old design still has much less travel than the 2015 models.