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Comment by allwein | Hacker News Reader

The telling thing for me is that there is not a single image of the keyboard head-on. The keyboard is a make or break feature on a laptop of this size. I fear that not showing any images of the keyboard is indicative of a sub-par experience.

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The keyboard is what I look at first as well, as I dislike laptops without a decent arrow key layout.

Engadget ( http://www.engadget.com/2012/01/10/dells-xps-13-ultrabook-an... ) had some pics recently, including some of the keyboard.

This problem has been solved many a ttimes before. It's not the first 13" laptop anybody has designed. So thogh I'd love to see a keyboard pic, I'd assume it's going to be inline with what's out there already.

Love these new ultrabooks btw. Apple kickstarted it as always and all the platforms benefit.

apple was a latecomer to the thin and light category. FYI.

It was one of the innovators in _affordable_ thin and light, though. While there were very light and thin laptops prior to the Air, they were usually either netbooks, or terribly expensive. Of course, so was the first-gen Air; the second one was really the interesting one.

nope, there were plenty of options like the Dell X1 (2.5lbs, 2005) and Sony VAIO Z (3.3lbs, 2000). these were mainstream and affordable and functional. the first air came in 2008.

The X1 was light, but it was not thin. Perhaps thinner than other notebooks that Dell was making at the time. But compared to a MacBook Air, any computer that has room to stack two USB ports on top of each other is a friggin' elephant.

What did the Vaio Z cost on release? My impression was that it, and all of Sony's ultra-small laptops, were always terrifyingly expensive. The current Vaio Z, certainly, starts at just under $2000.

1992 was pretty early http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerBook_Duo

i don't think it qualifies, not thin and not even that light.

At the time, that was what the MacBook Air is now. It was amazing and much missed.

For me, there are combinations of the location and size of the "Fn", "Enter", "Backspace", "Backslash" and "Right Shift" buttons that could make a keyboard a deal-breaker. E.g., my 9" eee has the shift right of the "up-arrow", and this is a poor design choice that I would hate if I used it day-in-day-out for real work. (My eee is a consumption device, so that's sort of ok)

Exactly. I overlooked a HUGE PROBLEM when I bought my HP DV6 online. They offset the whole keyboard one column to the right for the stupid function buttons.

http://i.imgur.com/pWcax.jpg (someone tell me what the encircled button does)

I had to disable every single one of those keys. You have no idea how many times I launched the damn calculator.

"This problem has been solved many a ttimes before."

Just because this has been "solved" before doesn't mean Dell solved it correctly here.

I loathe Apple for a few different company policy reasons and haven't bought one of their products since the iPhone 3G, but I still can't help but cringe at the crappy keyboard/display/touchpads non-Apple PC laptop makers continue to churn out, even on higher-end laptops, despite this being a "solved" problem. There are a few exceptions to the rule, but even the PC manufacturers who manage to get things right once or twice tend to just go and screw things up in next year's refresh.

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