New MacBook Air Fixes This Decades-Long Design Oversight | Hacker News Reader

New MacBook Air Fixes This Decades-Long Design Oversight

macrumors.com

16 pointsksec16 comments

Clickbait headline rescue: Apple changed the keycap symbol for the “Mute” key from just a speaker to a speaker with a strike/line through it.

Oh wow! Apple keeps innovating and MacRumors keeps clickbaiting.

The current icon made sense, "no sound, less sound, more sound".

I wonder why the strike line is going from bottom-right to top-left though.

It matches what it shows when you press that key, so I guess it makes sense

(And of course that orientation matches the usual traffic signs, like No Parking)

It’s the standard design: <https://emojipedia.org/muted-speaker#designs>

I posted it here hoping to know how the original design came to place. Muted Speaker graphics design is nothing new. I wonder why it was done that way and kept that long. Even Apple's UI graphics is a stroke across the speaker.

Because it’s within a set of three speaker buttons.

The first has no sound, the second a less sound, the third more sound. They correspond to mute (no sound), lower volume (less), raise volume (more).

Within the set of three buttons it’s perfectly sensible and intuitive.

It wouldn’t make sense on its own, but on the keyboard it isn’t.

Yes, within the set of three speaker icons it makes perfect sense.

If it was a one-off it’s unintuitive, but on the keyboard where it’s used it’s fine.

> The keyboard change is typical of Apple's meticulous attention to detail, even if it took more than a quarter-century to implement.

I thought this paragraph was absolutely hilarious. Especially if they had such meticulous attention to detail, it wouldn't have taken decades. The article is a joke.

In my world, that row has an 'esc' key (which I type every few seconds, as a longtime vi/etc user) and a fingerprint key. The keys in between are a mystery zone.

If apple move the 'control' key to the 'caps lock', well that would be sweet. The first thing I do on any computer is to remap those keys.

I'm betraying my age here. I long for an old-fashioned unix-style keyboard.

I've remapped these like so:

Define keymaps you want to change: https://github.com/joeyagreco/dotfiles/blob/583ba45088239928...

Apply keymaps: https://github.com/joeyagreco/dotfiles/blob/583ba45088239928...

That's it!

There's a system option to map Caps Lock to Escape that I found very convenient.

Glances down at my Framework 13 keyboard. They copied Apple and did the same (bad) thing.

I won't click on the link because of the clickbait title. Thanks, but no.

and still the keyboard mars and etches the screen when closed and carried

Macrumors... always April 1st

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