January 2022 • Macworld 39company has spent years trying to
fix. Of all the innovations from that
period, the only one that remains
intact is the Touch ID sensor on the
power button. The rest of the changes
are just a bad memory. So now what?
STICK WITH
THE CLASSICS
Never say never, but it sure feels like
Apple has learned its lesson–or at
least has been beaten up enough
for its decisions for a good, long
while. While it’s not very Apple-like
to consider any area of its products
completely solved and impervious to
innovation, when Apple pushed on the
keyboard, the keyboard (and its users)
pushed back.
Hard.
Taking it easy
for a while seems
like a very good
idea. The truth
is, we rely on our
computers – and
the keyboards
attached to
them – to do
our work, day
in and day out.
It’s not always
glamorous,
whether it’s
sending an email or writing a college
paper or filling out a web form, but
it’s usually important.
Reliability matters. Especially on a
laptop keyboard, since it’s integrated
with the rest of the device. On an
iMac, I can swap out Apple’s included
external keyboard for one I like better.
On a MacBook, I don’t have that
option. And if an external keyboard
breaks, you can substitute a new
one and keep on working, but with a
laptop, you have to take it in for repair
and lose your entire computer.
And then there’s the fact that
keyboards have worked pretty well
for decades, looking more or less like
they do today. (In fact, these days IThe Globe key (lower left with the Fn key) was introduced with
the iPad external keyboard and is now on the MacBook Pro.