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 easier or more natural to move the mouse cursor to that spot and click there, placing the insertion cursor where it’s needed. Others may use the arrow keys to move the insertion cursor directly. Which method you use is a matter of preference, but I can’t imagine that someone who uses only one of those methods exclusively would prefer that Microsoft should take the other away. The alternative method doesn’t hurt you in any way. And it’s more likely in this case that most people use both methods. It’s muscle memory at this point.

PC keyboards provide other ways to navigate within a document. You can tap Home to move the insertion cursor to the beginning of the line it’s in. Or tap End to move it to the end of that line. We have Page Up and Page Down keys to navigate one “page” up or down within the document, respectively, a somewhat old-fashioned concept that has nonetheless transitioned to this digital-first world. Every document-based application, including web browsers, supports this. But in a document-editing app like Word, these navigational techniques are tied to that editing functionality. You’re not just changing the view, you’re changing the location of the all-important insertion cursor. It comes with you as you page up and down in a document.

These keys do more than provide basic navigation. They can also be used in combination with other keys—as part of a keyboard shortcut—to provide other navigational features.

For example, typing Ctrl + Home will navigate to the top of the document, placing the insertion cursor in front of the very first character. And Ctrl + End will likewise navigate to the end of the document.

Typing Ctrl + Right Arrow will move the insertion cursor to beginning of the next word in the same line of the document. Typing Ctrl + Left Arrow will move it to the beginning of the previous word. And typing Ctrl + Up Arrow and Ctrl + Down Arrow performs the same sort of navigation, but by paragraph.

And then there’s selection. Text selection, in this case.

To select a particular word in a document, one might move the mouse cursor to the beginning (or end) of that word, press and hold the mouse button, and then drag the cursor to the right (or left), selecting as much text as needed. You can do this for multiple words, lines, paragraphs, or whatever. Or you can use the keyboard: After positioning the insertion cursor where you want it, hold down the Shift key and then tap the Right (or Left) Arrow key to select one character to its right (or left). You can keep tapping to add one character to the selection at a time. Or you can hold down Right (or Left) Arrow to select multiple characters until you release the key. You can also type Ctrl + Up (or Down) Arrow to span the selection across multiple lines and then paragraphs.

This is all very obvious, I suppose. But that’s sort of the point: I never expected to need to address this ingrained functionality. It’s so common, has worked the same way for so long, that I’d stopped thinking about it. Until that is, it stopped working normally. On some PCs.

Laptop keyboards require compromise. There’s a size issue, of course. And there’s no way for them to be truly ergonomic. But among the many design issues a PC maker faces is how to implement those Home, End, Page Up, and Page Down keys. They’re standard, of course, and they have to be there. But things change, too. And as PC usage changes because of various factors, PC makers adapt.

Some PCs include standalone Home, End, Page Up, and Page Down keys. Others integrate their functions into the arrow keys, requiring users to tap an additional key, Fn (function), to access those functions. For example, you have to type Fn + Left Arrow to access Home. Or Fn + Down Arrow to access Page Down. And this means the keyboard shortcuts I mentioned above (and others) can be more complicated because there’s an addition key to type. That’s fine. I understand that space is limited, and many people don’t know or use these shortcuts anyway. I can adapt.

What’s interesting, though, is that some PC keyboards offer both options. That is, they may have standalone Home, End, Page Up, and Page Down keys and the Fn-based Home, End, Page Up, and Page Down functions on the arrow keys. In this case, you can, say, navigate to the top of the document by typing either Ctrl + Home or Ctrl + Fn + Left Arrow.  That’s great. In fact, one might argue that this is an ideal configuration in the sense that it will work seamlessly for everyone, no matter which keyboard layout you’re familiar with.

That said, both configurations exist. Some PC keyboards with standalone Home, End, Page Up, and Page Down keys offer the Fn/arrow key-based alternatives too, and some do not. That, too, is fine. I get it. There are standalone keys, after all.

But this summer, for the first time, I’ve experienced something new. Something different. Something … worse.

And I’ve seen it twice, albeit with slight variations. Both times with HP laptops, which is interesting. But each with a different keyboard layout. One of these laptops—the HP EliteBook 1040 I’m currently reviewing and writing this article with—has standalone Home, End, Page Up, and Page Down keys. The other—the HP EliteBook Ultra I recently reviewed—does not, it only offers the Fn/arrow key-based alternatives.

And this change, this functional regression, as I see it, is maddening.

On both of these laptops, most keyboard shortcuts work normally. I can type Ctrl + Left Arrow to move word by word to the left, type Ctrl + End (or Ctrl + Fn + End) to move directly to the end of the document, and so on. But the Shift key-based selection shortcuts are broken. They don’t work at all, on both laptops. So this is clearly by design. I just can’t make sense of it.

What this means is that, for the first time, it’s not possible to easily select text with the keyboard using the familiar, standard keyboard shortcuts that have been in place for decades. When you type Shift + Home (or Fn + Shift + Left Arrow), it doesn’t select all the text to the left of the insertion cursor in the current line. On the EliteBook Ultra, it just moves the insertion cursor to the beginning of that line (ignoring Shift, I guess). On the 1040, it does … nothing. Nothing happens. Shift + End (or Fn + Shift + Right Arrow) behaves similarly on the EliteBook Ultra. Oddly, that keyboard shortcut works fine on the 1040.

To be clear, this isn’t a Word issue. In fact, I don’t use Word that much. I’ve experienced this issue in Visual Studio 2022. In iA Writer. In Notion. Everywhere.

The EliteBook 1040 keyboard, as noted, has standalone Home, End, Page Up, and Page Down keys. The latter two are jammed into the arrow key area, and they’re half-height and easy to mis-press, as are the Left Arrow and Right Arrow keys. It doesn’t offer the Fn-based alternatives, so typing Fn + Up Arrow doesn’t perform a Page Up, and so on. And while I’m OK with that, sort of, this is an expensive premium PC. I feel like it should do both. More importantly, I feel like it should just work correctly. But it does not.

I can’t explain any of this.

The EliteBook 1040’s Home key does double duty behind the F12 key, so you would think that perhaps typing Fn + F12 would equate to typing Home. But F12 is Home: When I tap that key in a document-based app, the insertion cursor moves to the beginning of the current line. (Oddly, when I type Fn + F12 in Word, a “Save as” dialog appears. Help.) But Shift + F12 (Home) doesn’t do a thing. When I type Ctrl + F12 (Home) in Word, an “Open” dialog appears. The hell.

I mentioned this issue in my EliteBook Ultra review, and I’ll mention it again when I review the 1040 next week. My many attempts at solving the problem have been largely unsuccessful, and it makes writing text and software code on each frustrating at times. (I did work around the problems I’ve had hitting the tiny Page Up and Page Down keys on the 1040, sort of, using a utility that let me map those keys to Left Arrow and Right Arrow, respectively. But that introduces other minor issues because now I can’t Page Up or Page Down.)

I get it, nothing is perfect. But this issue is literally impacting my efficiency. It feels broken. Like a mistake. And now I’ve experienced it on two different computers. That worries me for obvious reasons.

I reached out to HP. I’m curious whether they can explain this and, if so, what the rationale is. But I don’t recall ever experiencing an issue quite like this before. And it doesn’t feel purposeful.