“Before then, chiclet keyboards were evil, rubbery things,” notes Boing Boing’s Rob Beschizza. If you’ve typed on a laptop keyboard in the past 15 years, you’ve likely used a descendant of this design, which effectively was a 2004 take on the 2011 MacBook Air. It kept the key relatively firm while still ensuring flatness. The X505, in its efforts to take thinness to the extreme for the time, came up with a new approach to keyboards that was quickly emulated throughout the industry: It used scissor-switch based keys to press down on rubber domes, and put flat, chiclet-style keycaps on top of those switches. In 2004, Sony released a Vaio-branded laptop that most people have probably forgotten about but nonetheless casts a large shadow over modern computing. ![]() Why did big companies fall out of love with great desktop keyboards?
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |