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The stupidest trend in laptop design
- paulorlando 13y agoGood point. Liked the assessment of where eye focus is, though I often notice that I position myself slightly to the left of my balanced laptop, perhaps because I use my right hand for more than 1/2 of the keyboard.
- generj 13y agoWhy does it matter where eye focus is? Operating a keyboard shouldn't involve your eyes.
- hnha 13y ago> numpads on laptop keyboards. to save you the clickbait.
- Samuel_Michon 13y agoIt’s even more annoying for people who are used to operating the trackpad with their right-hand (as I am).
- Shorel 13y agoI totally agree with this post. Get your numpads out of my laptops!
- nulagrithom 13y agoI agree with this personally, but I did have a user demand a laptop with a built in numpad. She specifically said that a usb numpad would not cut it. It's not to have at least one model that features a numpad.
- Shorel 13y agoYes, I can also see myself demanding one of those clit mouse keyboards. However, this doesn't mean I can impose it on everyone.
- nulagrithom 13y agoWhat's your point? She didn't say she wanted every laptop ever made to have a numpad. Wanting a Lenovo TrackPoint doesn't mean you want it on every laptop ever made, nor are you imposing it on anyone. Do you think it's wrong for Lenovo to put it on their laptops? Do you think they should stop so that they don't impose it on anyone?
- umsm 13y agoLegacy design is popular because it's cheap.
- jblow 13y agoThis is a bad trend, but eliminating trackpad buttons is probably worse. (The fact that most people don't realize it is worse makes it even worse!)
- ek 13y agoTo be fair, Apple popularized the buttonless trackpad trend and is reasonably good at executing it; originally I was skeptical of it but Apple's clicky trackpads are very nice to use. 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.
- davidw 13y agoNo, the worst trend is the squashed screens. People writing - be it English or French, or source code of some kind, or for that matter, many other kinds of creating, work vertically, not with these super wide but not very tall screens.
- Guvante 13y agoThe recent trend of only offering 1080p screens as the luxury choice and 900p or worse for the standard is depressing. And of course all being 16:9 (since watching TV is totally what the average laptop is used for...)
- jamesbritt 13y agoI was all set to buy a new Thinkpad to replace my Dell D830, and found that Lenovo decided the Thinkpads all had to have "wide screen", not WUXGA (i.e. 1920x1200), so any new sub-17" machine would have a shorter screen (so cleverly named "wide screen"). 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.
- zokier 13y agoIf your work consists of single text from one corner of the screen to the opposite, then I guess your complaint makes sense. But for most people you'll have all sorts of things open, and widescreen enables throwing that all to the sides. There are plenty of examples: Photoshop (and GIMP, Illustrator, InDesign, Inkscape etc) having tool palettes in the sides, IDEs with all sorts of tools and document trees and whatnot, or if you are more of a text-editor guy then still you can have eg documentation and code side-by-side, etc. 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.
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- vinceguidry 13y agoI used to think I wanted a laptop with a number pad on it, then I saw one that actually had one, and hated it instantly. I feel bad for the poor saps that did get one.
- w1ntermute 13y agoI have no idea why numpads even exist on most desktop keyboards. They just make it more difficult to reach the mouse. I use the Filco Majestouch-2 in its "Tenkeyless" (no numpad) version[0], and it's great being able to reach the mouse so easily. 0: http://www.amazon.com/Filco-Majestouch-2-Tenkeyless-FKBN87M-EB2/dp/B004WOF7QM http://www.amazon.com/Filco-Majestouch-2-Tenkeyless-FKBN87M-...
- jolt 13y agoI use the numpad for every number i type on my keyboard. It's much faster and the time/energy i would save by having to move my hand a shorter distance to the mouse, is no where near the amount of time/energy i save by not having to look at the keyboard and find each individual number.
- w1ntermute 13y ago> the time/energy i would save by having to move my hand a shorter distance to the mouse, is no where near the amount of time/energy i save by not having to look at the keyboard and find each individual number. 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.
- eddiedunn 13y agoI felt exactly the same way when I first got a keyboard without a numpad. Then I realized that I should just get used to touch typing on the number row instead. Though I still prefer a numpad (old habits die hard), using the num-row really isn't that bad once you get the hang of it.
- tluyben2 13y agoI have been typing with 10 fingers blind for over 30 years now and I have used, first, the little nob some laptops had/have as mouse and now the trackpad on the Macbook; I don't lift/move my hand from the keyboard at all to use all keys and hardly for the mouse (trackpad). I type really fast at that, including numbers. A numpad on a laptop would be rather a waste of space and would slow me down as well as I would miss my right hand when typing words instead of numbers. 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.
- lamby 13y agoDon't disagree with any of that, but I bet the reason lots of laptops have numpads is that when Average Customer sees a laptop with and without one next to each other in a store, he will not choose the one without the numpad because, well, "you never know". Or the one without doesn't look like a "normal" keyboard: "maybe it's horrible to type on after a while?" etc.
- nekojima 13y agoI am very happy to have a numpad on my laptop (first time I've had one after five laptops without) and in all likelihood would only buy a laptop in the future with a numpad. The balancing issue took a few minutes to get used to, if I use on my lap, but otherwise, it was an easy adjustment to make. Using the numpad when entering figures into Excel or other programs is much easier than before when using the top-line of the keyboard, and no longer need to have a usb desktop keyboard around to help with that.
- soneca 13y agoI am an average user, not an accountant or anything like that and I like a lot the numpad. For filling forms (Phone, house number, postal code), passwords, basic Excel use, etc.
- gojomo 13y agoPeople who use their Windows laptops primarily for business/accounting data-entry tasks love the number pads. 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.
- MichaelGG 13y agoLenovo's been shipping 14" and 15" business laptops with 1366x768 screens for a while, and no one seems to want that. No users were benefited by trimming ThinkPads to a 6-row keyboard, yet they pushed ahead with that anyways. 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.
- gojomo 13y agoSure they can make mistakes... but the existence of multiple numpad-containing laptops, from multiple vendors, over many years is an existence proof of a preference among an important customer group (in addition to your personal testimony). 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.
- Zak 13y agoEven those crappy short screens: since businesses are buying them in preference to alternatives 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.
- Amadou 13y agoNearly 10 years ago I bought happy hacker keyboards without numpads for all of my desktops and I haven't missed the numpad one bit. I did get the model with cursor keys though (edited to add: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0000U1DJ2/ http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0000U1DJ2/ ). Giant keyboards are even more of a waste of space and ugly eyesore on the desktop than they are on a laptop. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happy_Hacking_Keyboard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happy_Hacking_Keyboard
- w1ntermute 13y ago> I did get the model with cursor keys though. 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.
- almosnow 13y agoThe stupidest trend in laptop design is... having a screen, you know, because I just use my laptop to feed music into my sound system. I don't need a screen I'm not even going to watch. And the mic input? The webcam? Come ooooon, are the designers just that f.... stupid??? Why do they keep bloating laptops with a lot of useless features that just add weight, moving parts and create health problems in the long run???
- wrongc0ntinent 13y agoI need numpads for fast stuff. Numpad keys are also not just duplicate numeric keycodes. Figure out a better laptop design, yes, but taking it out for good eliminates some use cases. While you're at it, make function keys work consistently across all manufacturers. edit: and I love butterns.
- pasquinelli 13y agoso, most people don't key in numbers with the number pad then? i only use the number pad for numbers. the number row seems like a really annoying way to enter numbers. it probably causes health problems, i suspect.
- lazylland 13y agoThe really stupid trend in laptop (and most portables) design is non-user replaceable batteries!! What can be at most a 10 USD, 30 second affair is now a drive to the service centre, a two week (if lucky) wait and a 100 USD bill ...
- adam12 13y agoDesign isn't all about looks.
- dragontamer 13y agoI like my numpad. In fact, I bought my laptop explicitly because it has a numpad on it. 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?
- hereonbusiness 13y ago16:9 display, glossy display, low screen resolution considering screen size, glossy plastic chassis, numpad. I would not consider buying a laptop that had any one of these.
- generj 13y agoNumber pads are very useful to me as a programmer. 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. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Numpad.svg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Numpad.svg
- AdrianRossouw 13y agoi think the general consensus is to learn vim instead of messing with home clusters.
- generj 13y agoYou can't use vim everywhere, and not everyone prefers it.
- pmelendez 13y ago> "the numpad is useless for the vast majority of people, and those who need numpads, already use them at desktop (keyboard) or, can buy numpads" 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.
- ChikkaChiChi 13y agoThe stupidest trend in blogging is complaining about available options. Just because you use a product a certain way doesn't mean everyone else does.
- RachelF 13y agoTiny arrow keys on the keyboards are also stupid. 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.
- zokier 13y agoHmm.. I just got an idea for a compromise: Put the numpad in the wasted space below the keyboard http://imgur.com/zrZAeg4 http://imgur.com/zrZAeg4 Centered keyboard, numeric entry, everyone is happy?
- mixmastamyk 13y agoAgreed. It is very hard today to find a cheap PC laptop without an accountant's keyboard. I don't even like them on desktops, a waste of space (for me).
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- tluyben2 13y agoI don't like numpads either, but I see why some people do like them. Low resolution screens however; that does no-one any good I would say. And for me it's downright annoying. I work mostly exclusively on laptops and having as much room on one screen as possible is very valuable for me. 1366x768 is insanely low and yet most laptops have had it for years.
- ChuckMcM 13y agoOr conversely put a pad of usefulness to the left of the keyboard as well to maintain symmetry. I don't know about the author but if the G15 keyboard came with a fully programmable 'number pad' like arrangement to the left of control and a number pad to the right of enter I would be totally OK with that.