FnLk is the inverse of smart design

2020/11/15
fnlk, keyboard, design, hardware
The presence of FnLk, along with the disappearing of PgUp/PgDn near the arrow keys, is exactly Form-over-Function, or lacking of thought, or designed not for work.

Got a new 2020 XPS laptop recently, the hardware's mostly good, the software's clean enough, but typing on the keyboard made me start to miss the ThinkPad. To be fair the software of the Lenovo ThinkPad on Win10 is a mess, UI full of Ads and news disguised as hardware drivers, though I have to admit is quite "innovative".

In my point of view, nowadays design is going down hills, or it's a race to the bottom, where the "bottom" meaning being unbelievably silly. Recent years laptop keyboard starts to drop the ball one brand after another, and the most common problem being the full adoption of "FnLk" and default to multimedia buttons.

Default to multimedia buttons is not smart, and it's backwards in many ways:

• there's auto brightness function, are they not doing their work?
• headphones without volume buttons is rare, so why not just support that, like phones?
• there'll be at least 1 more system shortcut to do the same thing, some software may add more
• these keys do not combine, and they do not provide value more than 1-button-tap

And the last one is really bad, the multimedia keys are all single-purposed, designed to be as simple as possible, perfect! So the price will be other function key combos becomes 1-key-more complex, and I bet no one working with those keyboard would say: "worth it!".

Same logic with the missing PgUp/PgDn keys, for most work and a large part of web-browsing, scrolling is less efficient than a single predictable and concise PgDn. Editing text without those keys is almost painful.

Enough rants, and even I may later get used to those, willingly or not. It's simultaneously astonishing and sad to see all people stop to think and just adapt to their own creation. I'll not list more bad designs, but I guess you already have some in mind.

But I'll wait for the eventual change, and take the chance if I can do something about it. And I hope you will not do nothing, don't give in.