Maybe You’re Just Not My Type (Premium)

In an ideal world, every product we use would be perfect. But this isn't an ideal world and there are no perfect products. As HP's Mike Nash once told me, every product is a compromise. That is, in designing a product, you are trying to address a particular need, a particular market, and you must balance the feature set, materials, and costs with the customer's expectations. You're spending the customer's money, essentially, and the goal is a product that delivers what they need or want at a price that feels commensurate with the value.

Compromises are more frequent and obvious with less expensive products. That's reasonable. For example, a $600 laptop might offer Windows Hello facial or fingerprint recognition capabilities, but not both, because of the component costs. But when you buy a premium laptop, one that costs perhaps $1500, I feel you should get both. That's just one simple example, but you can apply this thinking to display panel choices, USB ports and configurations, connectivity, or almost anything else.

This isn't rocket science. But some components are more nuanced. Like the keyboard.

There are established norms, of course. The QWERTY layout that is, for better or worse, the standard. Certain expectations and platform requirements with regard to certain keys being present and, in some cases, their locations on the keyboard. A function row that now (almost always) defaults to special functions (volume, screen brightness, and so on) instead of the more traditional functions that vary by app (F1, F2, and so on). A Windows key, and, now, a Copilot key for AI PCs (PCs with an NPU).

Beyond that, we see whatever special keys or layout customizations each PC maker delivers. The infamous positional swapping of the Ctrl and Fn keys that's unique to ThinkPads being an obvious example.

In more recent years, I've seen HP and other PC makers experiment with what I'll call the secondary keys, things like Home, End, Page Up, and Page Down. These keys are in some ways old-fashioned, dating back to the dawn of the PC era, much like function keys, Caps Lock, Insert, and other oddities. But they are critical for people who spend their days, as I do, writing. And how or whether these keys are placed in a keyboard, and what alternatives are available, has emerged as a strange sticking point.

Consider a typical document-based application like Microsoft Word. You open the app and you type. It supports a long list of navigational capabilities you probably don't think about all that much. But using the keyboard or the mouse/touchpad (or multitouch or pen, if available), you can move the insertion cursor—the little "I-beam" that indicates where text will appear when you type—around as needed. This multi-use functionality is key to the PC experience, as it brings both versatility and complexity.

Here's a simple example: As you type, you notice some text in the preceding paragraph that you'd like to edit in some way. Some will find it...