If there’s anything that Apple has proven to the industry over the years, it’s that aesthetics matter. Not everyone believes this yet: one need only look around at all the less than beautiful products to see that the message has not fully sunk in.
But when, at a 2003 keynote, Steve Jobs introduced the backlit keyboard to adulatory oohs and aahs, I was in the minority, waiting impatiently for the moment to pass. The backlit keyboard looks good, but does it really solve a true need? Are there really legions of hunters and peckers hunched over their keyboards in the dark, squinting to find the letters, praying for a flashlight?
If you’re a touch typist, you keep your eyes on the screen. Does it help you that the keyboard is backlit? For non-touch typists, when you happen to be in dim lighting conditions, doesn’t the display illuminate the keyboard enough to find the key you need?
How often do you compute in the dark? The clearest scenario might be the dimmed cabin of a night-time flight. If you aren’t a touch typist a backlit keyboard would make it easier to type. Wouldn’t you just turn on the overhead light? Battery life is often the scarcest commodity, and there never seems to be enough of it. I tend to turn the screen down as far as possible to stretch it to the bitter end. Sure, a glowing keyboard might attract attention and earn me some desperately needed cool points, but it would come at a cost of frantic computing minutes.
When I got my first backlit PowerBook, my expectations were confirmed. I used it for years, hardly ever needing the backlighting. When I tried, there were issues. You see, in good lighting, the keys are dark on light. And in a dark room, the keys are supposed to be bright on dark. With in-between lighting, the keys are mid-tone on mid-tone. Yep, very low contrast. Unreadable. Imagine all the keys being like the ‘I’ and ‘9′ keys in this simulation:
When the lights go down the MacBook Pro’s keyboard lights up. When lighting is in-between, contrast can be low.
At the end of the day, the cool back-lighting was just as likely to make the keys less legible than more legible. Oops. (This issue has come up before: The Palm V also went from dark-on-light with the backlight off to reverse text (light-on-dark) with backlight on. It was thus nearly impossible to read in medium ambient light.)
By the way, the newer MacBook Pros of 2006 have corrected the problem with much brighter backlighting. At full blast it will burn holes in your retinas. What this does for battery life, I cannot say.
Another issue with the first back-lit PowerBooks: the Function keys were not lit, only the QWERTY keys. As a touch-typist, I don’t need help with the QWERTYs, thank you. The QWERTYs I have had down cold since college. If I ever needed backlighting it would be on on the function keys, the ones that are less used, small, un-bumped, un-clustered keys. The ones that I sometimes have to look at the keyboard for. The Function keys, which were dark on the original Powerbooks.
So backlighting on keyboards looks very cool but isn’t all that functional, at least for touch-typists.
But it made me wonder: if we had to take backlighting as a given, is there a way to make it more functional and not just a fashion statement?
One annoyance I do run into is having an Num Lock key pressed accidentally. Pressing Num Lock turns a parallelogram of keys on the right half of the keyboard into a faux numeric keyboard. The rest of the keys are disabled. The problem is, it’s maddeningly easy to accidentally enter Num Lock mode. All you have to do is accidentally press F6 when you meant to press F5 or F7 or 6 or 7. And it can be hard to figure out why the keyboard is not responding normally.
Meanwhile, who actually uses that faux-numeric keyboard for its intended purpose? [Readers? Do you?] It’s just too hard to find the tiny secondary numbers labels, and they are in an odd shape.
What if, in Num Lock mode, we could selectively brighten the little numbers and keep the other keys black? It would look like this:
Mock-up showing numeric keys backlit in a different color when Num Lock is activated and other backlighting turned off.
This would require another channel of light, preferably in a different color. This is not an innovation that will solve global warming, just a nice, functional tweak. Perhaps more people would learn, use and benefit from the embedded numeric keyboard.
Here’s a gratuitous tweak. On the Mac, to enter an accented letter, you first type the accent with the Alt key, then you type a vowel. Between the two strokes, the keyboard is in a transient mode, waiting for you to type the right letter to go under the ¨ or the ˆ. What if, during this mode, the possible letters that could be accented were highlighted?
The keyboard could highlight context-sensitive command keys. For example, when an accent is entered, the vowels would highlight.
Okay, this is pretty gratuitous too. It’s a stretch trying to make backlighting actually functional.
Maybe the backlit keyboard could help users find special glyphs like æ and ƒ and ®. My first computer, the 128k Macintosh, had a great Key Caps desk accessory for just this purpose. (Curiously, this feature that used to be SO important that it was built into the cramped ROM of the 1984 Mac is now extremely hard to find in 2007 MacOS X. If you need it, try out the free KeyViewer utility.)
Keycaps from the 1984 Mac System 1.1 help you find alternate characters on the keyboard.
Maybe when you hold down option for a moment the keycap glyphs would emerge from the keyboards with backlighting as I describe for the numeric keys. Unfortunately, this idea is not very practical. You would need different glyphs for Alt- and Alt-Shifted keys. What’s more, the glyphs depend on the font in use. If you really wanted to pull this off, you would need something like the exorbitant Optimus keyboard.
The Optimus keyboard concept demonstrates keycaps with small color displays under each key.
I am not bullish on this keyboard as the future of computing for [regular] users. Who wants to take eyes off the display to look at the input device? There is some benefit to displays-on-keycaps for learning keyboard shortcuts, but the cost for that benefit is far too high.
[Update 9/13/07: After seeing the video for the new $28,000 Xynergi keyboard I'm a bit more bullish on the idea's potential, especially for pro users. The demo video demonstrated new scenarios for arbitrary key cap images that the Optimus did not: 1. for color coding clusters of functions 2. to reflect modes (e.g. play/pause) and 3. to reflect system status. The keyboard becomes not just an input device, but an output device as well, an extension of the display. For professional media editing and other specialized fields, it would be a welcome luxury. And maybe, when cheap enough, a luxury for the rest of us too.]
So perhaps the greatest function of the backlit keyboards is to make you look and Apple look cool.
Readers: When do you use keyboard backlighting on your Apple laptops? How important is it to you?
