The damn’ thing doesn’t even have a Forward-delete key. If you want to delete the character to the right of the cursor, you have to press a key labelled ‘FN’ and simultaneously press the Backspace-delete key. Intuitive it ain’t.
It also lacks other useful keys. For example, the UK keyboard has no has no hash key (#). Pressing Shift-3 produces the pound symbol (£). It took me a while to figure out, and a fair bit of Googling, that you have to press ALT+3 to produce a hash – something that is vital to know if you do much programming.
A Tale Of Two Keyboards: my original (above) - small, beautiful and impractical; my new one (below) a bigger, less elegant beast but one that I can live with.
There are other keys that are missing too. Missing, that is, if you re used to working on a PC. No Page-Up or Page-Down, for instance. Well, I finally gave up fighting against the damn’ thing and decided to invest in a better keyboard. The one I bought was the alternative Apple keyboard with an integrated numeric keypad (another thing that is missing from the dinky little keyboard that’s supplied s standard). This extended keyboard cost me about £50 and it is money well-spent. Not only does it have a Forward-delete key (thank God!), but it also adds on Page-Up, Page-Down even a pair of Start-of-Document/End-of-Document keys. It still doesn’t have a dedicated Hash key but I guess can learn to live with the ALT-3 key combination to produce a # when I need one.
And, as an added bonus, the keyboard is wired. At first sight I thought the standard unwired (Bluetooth) keyboard seemed pretty neat. The trouble is, it needs batteries. And batteries have to be replaced (at inconvenient moments, usually when I haven’t got any suitable batteries to hand). On the whole, I think I’ll be happier with my new, slightly less beautiful but hugely more practical, wired keyboard. Oh, the simple joy of a Forward-delete key!
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