The stupidest trend in laptop design
ramblingfoo.blogspot.com
ramblingfoo.blogspot.com
This blogger does not know the market better than the large and profitable manufacturers selling into it. The manufacturers have real numbers backing their decisions – not subjective aesthetic and ergonomic hand-waving. If customers weren't choosing (and even paying extra for) for the numpad, it'd disappear quickly.
HP shipped plenty of laptops with massive heat issues (literally painful to the touch, even sitting idle at the MS Store).
To think that OEMs always know best is wishful thinking. Although in the case of a numpad on a large style laptop, I'd probably prefer it.
The only good thing is that Apple is showing them up, so they're finally responding in kind, rather than racing to the bottom against Dell and HP.
As far as vertical space, which you argue as a positive of the 6-row layout, is negated by the fact they switched to a less vertical screen, and hence, keyboard.
Edit: As far as Lenovo doesn't know what they're doing... do a screw count on modern designs. Look at how much work is involved replacing the most common part (fan) - you've got to take _everything_ out. I've no reason to believe the high-level technical decisions are being made more intelligently than the obvious lack in quality at the low-level.
Even those crappy short screens: since businesses are buying them in preference to alternatives, they must find something about the cost and form acceptable. For business-focused machines, used by non-technical employees in brief spurts with a single full-screen app to get specific things done, a small screen may be preferable! HN commenters and coder/designer bloggers are not the customer.
What alternatives? There are no business laptops with full screens on the market. Lenovo offered 4:3 and 16:10 models that were otherwise comparable for a very short period of time. Buyers, from what I remember of the period, did not tend to prefer the 16:10 models. I'm not sure if anybody else had a comparable overlap. The switch from 16:10 to 16:9 was even more abrupt.
You are assuming that consumers are making rational and informed choices. The fact that people buy numpad-equipped laptops does not mean that they prefer it, but rather it means that it is what is being sold to them.
If there is a minority that is willing to pay extra for the numpad, and a majority who are ignorant about the compromises involved and thus ambivalent about the choice, then of course manufacturers are going to cater that minority and squish couple extra bucks while sacrificing the majority. But that doesn't mean that numpad would be beneficial to the ignorant majority.
to save you the clickbait.
And of course for laptops, especially smaller ones, widescreen provides the unique advantage of maximizing keyboard size to total body size as keyboards are wide by nature. Admittedly this is less of a concern for 15"+ models, but I've never been a fan of those.
Still unclear how having the extra 120 pixels of a WUXGA screen would make that any harder.
1920x1200 (AKA WUXGA) was standard on Dell and Lenovo laptops for quite some time, and then they decided to go short-screen.
This is what gets me: 1080p "HD" screens are not any wider than the previous standard 1920x1200 screens, yet somehow that's how they are sold.
I managed to grab a W500 from the Lenovo outlet, howerver.
I'm hoping that this thing stays useful for a while until higher resolutions become more the norm. (Dell offering the XPS 15 is encouraging.)
Still, when I see Lenovo hiring Ashton Kutcher as a "product engineer" I despair of them ever caring about business machines ever again.
edit: and I love butterns.
Nice, yet another blogger that says that I do not exist. I need a numpad, and I don't want to carry with another peripheral and no... I don't have a desktop.
And I also like the fact that the PC market caters to every niche. I know some people don't like numpads on laptops, but I do. So you can buy a laptop without one, and I'll go buy one with one. Bam, both of us are happy.
What is wrong with that?
Giant keyboards are even more of a waste of space and ugly eyesore on the desktop than they are on a laptop.
Do you mean the HHKB Pro JP? Don't the tiny spacebar and vertical enter key bother you? Not to mention a bunch of symbols being in different places.
People forget that they aren't only useful for number entry...Num lock is there for a reason.
It's a solution from the horrible absence/reconfiguration of the Home cluster, as the numpad can be used for that purpose. And it can be used for rapid text movement. If you aren't using numpad as a programmer, you might be suprised at the code editing benefits.
I would not consider buying a laptop that had any one of these.
That said, Lenovo made the decision to integrate a Synaptics Clickpad in a lot of the recent ThinkPads and it's basically untenable - on my ThinkPad I've turned the trackpad entirely off because the Clickpad is just so unusable.
Centered keyboard, numeric entry, everyone is happy?
Most people use the arrow keys way more than CAPS LOCK but guess which occupies more area.
Also needing a key combination for PgUp/PgDn Home etc.
0: http://www.amazon.com/Filco-Majestouch-2-Tenkeyless-FKBN87M-...
I can see it's handy for some people (like most people like an actual mouse) but I do see the OP his point; at least here most shops carry mostly laptops with numpads and they are not an option. The choices are heavily limited because of this.
This isn't true for the vast majority of people, because they don't enter enough numbers for it to make sense. Moreover, if you learn how to touchtype the number keys above the letter keys, it's actually not that much slower than using the numpad.
I prefer add-on USB numpads, because I'm left handed and etc. But still, numpads are great and you only really appreciate how good they are when you have to type out a stupid list.
Very few, and if I did, I would get an add-on numpad. Chances are, I wouldn't be continuously entering numbers - there would be times when I needed to enter a lot, and times when I didn't need to enter that many. Having an add-on numpad would let me move it out of the way when I didn't need it.
In fact, even though I'm right-handed, I would try to learn to enter numbers left-handed, because it would be great to be able to put the numpad on the left side of the keyboard, thereby solving the distance-to-mouse problem.
But my basic point is that numpads are not needed by the majority of computer users, as evidenced by the popularity of laptops that don't have numpads (ironically, unlike the linked article suggests, I actually haven't seen that many PC laptops with numpads).
You'd think so, but muscle memory is very powerful. If you're accustomed to a number pad and are typing an e-mail that contains just one reference to a number ( 2.388 ) the default action is still to try to type it on the num pad.
Using the top-row of numeric keys whilst tapping the decimal with the little finger is very slow and awkward by comparison and requires a context-change.
If you type for even an hour each day, you owe it to yourself to try out a mechanical keyboard...I'd never go back.
Get your numpads out of my laptops!
However, this doesn't mean I can impose it on everyone.