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Comment by userbinator | Hacker News Reader

Agreed on the screens, and I'll add to that the trend of cut-down keyboards with missing/non-standard key arrangements and absolutely flat keys.

Low key-travel to actuation is fine (and actually makes for faster typing), but there needs to be a soft "damping" stop past that to cushion and rebound the fingers, otherwise it feels excessively rough and abrupt to type on.

Then again, seeing how many people just can't seem to type without looking at the keys, or barely use the keyboard at all, it's not surprising that evolution has removed the features of keyboards that don't give any advantage for them.

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I'd like to add touchpads with a pair of discrete buttons.

I'm the first to admit that my hand-eye coordination on touchpads sucks, but my finger has a tendency to move when clicking on those Apple style, pivoting touchpads. More often than not, it moves the pointer away from what I'm trying to click onto something I don't want to click.

Of course it's a preference thing, but I love the ability to click wherever my fingers may be - I also have never had my fingers accidentally move when clicking. I also really like having all the space to use for gestures without the discreet buttons.

I'm really happy the rest of the world is finally catching up with Apple's trackpads. No more unresponsive synaptic driver nonsense.

I think a lot of keyboard preferences come from habits.

I'm a bit of a thinkpad addict, mainly because of the excellent track-point, but also for thier good keyboards, or so I thought: I've been using my current x220 for 4 or 5 years and cannot replace it right now. I'm a vim user and sure enough, the escape key was the first (and for now only) to go. It's completely gone, all there is instead is a piece of circuit board, but it actually works if you touch it. Well, I've been using it like this for a couple of weeks now, got used to it, and it's not as bad as I thought it would be, now I think that I could actually use a "touch" keyboard with no keys.

I replaced my Lenovo T60 keyboard something like 5 times within the 3-year warranty period. Half the keys would stop working intermittently, and flexing the board up in the middle would make it temporarily mostly work. Also replaced the AC adapter like 6 times for insufficient strain relief (one of those times the replacement 2-prong had so much leakage current they asked me to send it to their engineering department and upgraded me to the 3-prong CE version). And lest you think I'm just into laptop sports, my previous IBM T22 had 0 keyboard and maybe 1 AC adapter replacement over its 5-year life and I was actually more mobile with it.

If you get sick of your psuedotouch esc, you should be able to find a replacement X220 keyboard for maybe $40/$80 (used/new) and it's one of the easiest parts to swap.

Also, I can't express how happy I'll be when this shortscreen fad is over.

I'm sure in the next few generations of the Macbook Retina or Surface Typecover we'll just have flat surfaces with pressure sensitivity and haptic feedback.

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