Jim Dalrymple Reviews the New 12-Inch MacBook

Jim Dalrymple, on a subject near and dear to my heart, the feel of the new keyboard:

When you first start using the keyboard, you may get the feeling that you didn’t actually hit the key, but you really did. This is what will take some getting used to — I am typing very quickly with the MacBook now, but it took a day or two in order for my mind to trust my fingers were hitting all the keys.

The arrow keys took the most time to get used to. Surprising, I know. However, I use the up and down arrow keys a lot to navigate email messages and RSS feeds and those keys are quite close together — in fact, they are the only two keys on the keyboard that are so close together. It’s like the person that designed the keyboard doesn’t use those two keys and put them together like that because it looked better. At any rate, those keys are just taking a bit longer for me to use without error. I hope for a change in the future.

The difference between the new arrow key layout and the old one is that the left and right keys are now full height, but the up/down ones are still half-height.

Overall, it sounds like the machine you think it is: an iPad-esque device for people who would rather use OS X with a laptop form factor than iOS on a tablet as their portable. People who want this thing to have more ports and better performance aren’t looking at it for what it is — they’re looking at it for what they want it to be.

★ Thursday, 9 April 2015