People who use their Windows laptops primarily for business/accounting data-entry tasks love the number pads.
This blogger does not know the market better than the large and profitable manufacturers selling into it. The manufacturers have real numbers backing their decisions – not subjective aesthetic and ergonomic hand-waving. If customers weren't choosing (and even paying extra for) for the numpad, it'd disappear quickly.
Lenovo's been shipping 14" and 15" business laptops with 1366x768 screens for a while, and no one seems to want that. No users were benefited by trimming ThinkPads to a 6-row keyboard, yet they pushed ahead with that anyways.
HP shipped plenty of laptops with massive heat issues (literally painful to the touch, even sitting idle at the MS Store).
To think that OEMs always know best is wishful thinking. Although in the case of a numpad on a large style laptop, I'd probably prefer it.
Oh great, the typical Lenovo-doesn't-know-what-they're-doing comment. And of course it's completely wrong. Tons of people want 1366x768 screens on their 15" laptops. Otherwise it makes everything too small! That's what they think and that's what they want. And having the 6-row keyboard helps touchpad users, which is the majority of the Thinkpad customer base, have larger touchpads, and a smaller overall chassis with bigger palmrest, especially on the X240 but also on the T440s and T440.
I don't know what you mean by "makes everything too small". 1366x786 is shipped on 10" laptops just fine; saying it's needed at 15" is silly. Not to mention, Lenovo doesn't even offer many alternatives, except on the higher-end models.
The only good thing is that Apple is showing them up, so they're finally responding in kind, rather than racing to the bottom against Dell and HP.
As far as vertical space, which you argue as a positive of the 6-row layout, is negated by the fact they switched to a less vertical screen, and hence, keyboard.
Edit: As far as Lenovo doesn't know what they're doing... do a screw count on modern designs. Look at how much work is involved replacing the most common part (fan) - you've got to take _everything_ out. I've no reason to believe the high-level technical decisions are being made more intelligently than the obvious lack in quality at the low-level.
Sure they can make mistakes... but the existence of multiple numpad-containing laptops, from multiple vendors, over many years is an existence proof of a preference among an important customer group (in addition to your personal testimony).
Even those crappy short screens: since businesses are buying them in preference to alternatives, they must find something about the cost and form acceptable. For business-focused machines, used by non-technical employees in brief spurts with a single full-screen app to get specific things done, a small screen may be preferable! HN commenters and coder/designer bloggers are not the customer.
Even those crappy short screens: since businesses are buying them in preference to alternatives
What alternatives? There are no business laptops with full screens on the market. Lenovo offered 4:3 and 16:10 models that were otherwise comparable for a very short period of time. Buyers, from what I remember of the period, did not tend to prefer the 16:10 models. I'm not sure if anybody else had a comparable overlap. The switch from 16:10 to 16:9 was even more abrupt.
> If customers weren't choosing (and even paying extra for) for the numpad, it'd disappear quickly.
You are assuming that consumers are making rational and informed choices. The fact that people buy numpad-equipped laptops does not mean that they prefer it, but rather it means that it is what is being sold to them.
If there is a minority that is willing to pay extra for the numpad, and a majority who are ignorant about the compromises involved and thus ambivalent about the choice, then of course manufacturers are going to cater that minority and squish couple extra bucks while sacrificing the majority. But that doesn't mean that numpad would be beneficial to the ignorant majority.
There are so many laptop options without number-pads – usually cheaper, even. No one is being fooled or forced to accept a numpad. A few naive or first-time buyers might not yet know what they want... they'll either return/exchange their mistake or fix their choice next time.
You can always buy a USB number pad for data entry tasks, but you can't remove a numpad from an existing keyboard. A 3rd party number pad is probably higher quality anyway.
This sacrifices a number of portability bonuses that laptops usually bring. Try finding a place to put a USB laptop on a flight, or finding space to put it on one of those small student desks that has less surface area than the laptop itself.
No way, then I'd have to deal with that annoying cord all over my desk and then having it invariably get tangled in my backpack. It's not that big of a deal to have a slightly offset keyboard.
Exactly. The main reason I chose my current laptop over another was because it has a number pad. I now have a work issued laptop without a number pad, so I have to drag around my work issued keyboard because zipping through excel efficiently without it is harder.
I am very happy to have a numpad on my laptop (first time I've had one after five laptops without) and in all likelihood would only buy a laptop in the future with a numpad. The balancing issue took a few minutes to get used to, if I use on my lap, but otherwise, it was an easy adjustment to make. Using the numpad when entering figures into Excel or other programs is much easier than before when using the top-line of the keyboard, and no longer need to have a usb desktop keyboard around to help with that.
I am an average user, not an accountant or anything like that and I like a lot the numpad. For filling forms (Phone, house number, postal code), passwords, basic Excel use, etc.
No, the worst trend is the squashed screens. People writing - be it English or French, or source code of some kind, or for that matter, many other kinds of creating, work vertically, not with these super wide but not very tall screens.
If your work consists of single text from one corner of the screen to the opposite, then I guess your complaint makes sense. But for most people you'll have all sorts of things open, and widescreen enables throwing that all to the sides. There are plenty of examples: Photoshop (and GIMP, Illustrator, InDesign, Inkscape etc) having tool palettes in the sides, IDEs with all sorts of tools and document trees and whatnot, or if you are more of a text-editor guy then still you can have eg documentation and code side-by-side, etc.
And of course for laptops, especially smaller ones, widescreen provides the unique advantage of maximizing keyboard size to total body size as keyboards are wide by nature. Admittedly this is less of a concern for 15"+ models, but I've never been a fan of those.
My older Dell - from 3/4 years ago - had one of those screens. My latest one is very nice. It's an XPS 13 with Ubuntu, but it has a shorter screen at the same width. All the other specs are far superior to the older machine. It irritates me.
The recent trend of only offering 1080p screens as the luxury choice and 900p or worse for the standard is depressing. And of course all being 16:9 (since watching TV is totally what the average laptop is used for...)
I was all set to buy a new Thinkpad to replace my Dell D830, and found that Lenovo decided the Thinkpads all had to have "wide screen", not WUXGA (i.e. 1920x1200), so any new sub-17" machine would have a shorter screen (so cleverly named "wide screen").
I managed to grab a W500 from the Lenovo outlet, howerver.
I'm hoping that this thing stays useful for a while until higher resolutions become more the norm. (Dell offering the XPS 15 is encouraging.)
Still, when I see Lenovo hiring Ashton Kutcher as a "product engineer" I despair of them ever caring about business machines ever again.
I need numpads for fast stuff. Numpad keys are also not just duplicate numeric keycodes. Figure out a better laptop design, yes, but taking it out for good eliminates some use cases. While you're at it, make function keys work consistently across all manufacturers.
> "the numpad is useless for the vast majority of people, and those who need numpads, already use them at desktop (keyboard) or, can buy numpads"
Nice, yet another blogger that says that I do not exist. I need a numpad, and I don't want to carry with another peripheral and no... I don't have a desktop.
I like my numpad. In fact, I bought my laptop explicitly because it has a numpad on it.
And I also like the fact that the PC market caters to every niche. I know some people don't like numpads on laptops, but I do. So you can buy a laptop without one, and I'll go buy one with one. Bam, both of us are happy.
Nearly 10 years ago I bought happy hacker keyboards without numpads for all of my desktops and I haven't missed the numpad one bit. I did get the model with cursor keys though (edited to add: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0000U1DJ2/ ).
Giant keyboards are even more of a waste of space and ugly eyesore on the desktop than they are on a laptop.
Number pads are very useful to me as a programmer.
People forget that they aren't only useful for number entry...Num lock is there for a reason.
It's a solution from the horrible absence/reconfiguration of the Home cluster, as the numpad can be used for that purpose. And it can be used for rapid text movement. If you aren't using numpad as a programmer, you might be suprised at the code editing benefits.
The really stupid trend in laptop (and most portables) design is non-user replaceable batteries!! What can be at most a 10 USD, 30 second affair is now a drive to the service centre, a two week (if lucky) wait and a 100 USD bill ...
To be fair, Apple popularized the buttonless trackpad trend and is reasonably good at executing it; originally I was skeptical of it but Apple's clicky trackpads are very nice to use.
That said, Lenovo made the decision to integrate a Synaptics Clickpad in a lot of the recent ThinkPads and it's basically untenable - on my ThinkPad I've turned the trackpad entirely off because the Clickpad is just so unusable.
I don't like numpads either, but I see why some people do like them. Low resolution screens however; that does no-one any good I would say. And for me it's downright annoying. I work mostly exclusively on laptops and having as much room on one screen as possible is very valuable for me. 1366x768 is insanely low and yet most laptops have had it for years.
Good point. Liked the assessment of where eye focus is, though I often notice that I position myself slightly to the left of my balanced laptop, perhaps because I use my right hand for more than 1/2 of the keyboard.
I have no idea why numpads even exist on most desktop keyboards. They just make it more difficult to reach the mouse. I use the Filco Majestouch-2 in its "Tenkeyless" (no numpad) version[0], and it's great being able to reach the mouse so easily.
I use the numpad for every number i type on my keyboard. It's much faster and the time/energy i would save by having to move my hand a shorter distance to the mouse, is no where near the amount of time/energy i save by not having to look at the keyboard and find each individual number.
I have been typing with 10 fingers blind for over 30 years now and I have used, first, the little nob some laptops had/have as mouse and now the trackpad on the Macbook; I don't lift/move my hand from the keyboard at all to use all keys and hardly for the mouse (trackpad). I type really fast at that, including numbers. A numpad on a laptop would be rather a waste of space and would slow me down as well as I would miss my right hand when typing words instead of numbers.
I can see it's handy for some people (like most people like an actual mouse) but I do see the OP his point; at least here most shops carry mostly laptops with numpads and they are not an option. The choices are heavily limited because of this.
> the time/energy i would save by having to move my hand a shorter distance to the mouse, is no where near the amount of time/energy i save by not having to look at the keyboard and find each individual number.
This isn't true for the vast majority of people, because they don't enter enough numbers for it to make sense. Moreover, if you learn how to touchtype the number keys above the letter keys, it's actually not that much slower than using the numpad.
I felt exactly the same way when I first got a keyboard without a numpad. Then I realized that I should just get used to touch typing on the number row instead. Though I still prefer a numpad (old habits die hard), using the num-row really isn't that bad once you get the hang of it.
How many numbers do you enter? A numpad is really nice if you have to enter a bunch of numerical data.
I prefer add-on USB numpads, because I'm left handed and etc. But still, numpads are great and you only really appreciate how good they are when you have to type out a stupid list.
Very few, and if I did, I would get an add-on numpad. Chances are, I wouldn't be continuously entering numbers - there would be times when I needed to enter a lot, and times when I didn't need to enter that many. Having an add-on numpad would let me move it out of the way when I didn't need it.
In fact, even though I'm right-handed, I would try to learn to enter numbers left-handed, because it would be great to be able to put the numpad on the left side of the keyboard, thereby solving the distance-to-mouse problem.
But my basic point is that numpads are not needed by the majority of computer users, as evidenced by the popularity of laptops that don't have numpads (ironically, unlike the linked article suggests, I actually haven't seen that many PC laptops with numpads).
> Having an add-on numpad would let me move it out of the way when I didn't need it.
You'd think so, but muscle memory is very powerful. If you're accustomed to a number pad and are typing an e-mail that contains just one reference to a number ( 2.388 ) the default action is still to try to type it on the num pad.
Using the top-row of numeric keys whilst tapping the decimal with the little finger is very slow and awkward by comparison and requires a context-change.
I don't think it would be that difficult. I have a set of custom keyboard shortcuts on my main computer, which runs Linux. But when I have to use someone else's computer that runs Windows or OS X, I have no trouble instantaneously adapting to the shortcut setup on those OSes. And there are plenty of reports of people who primarily use Dvorak but can use Qwerty as well when necessary.
Yeah, I don't know what's up with the price. I got mine from an Amazon reseller for $172 shipped from Japan. Not sure why it's so expensive on there now.
Don't disagree with any of that, but I bet the reason lots of laptops have numpads is that when Average Customer sees a laptop with and without one next to each other in a store, he will not choose the one without the numpad because, well, "you never know". Or the one without doesn't look like a "normal" keyboard: "maybe it's horrible to type on after a while?" etc.
Or conversely put a pad of usefulness to the left of the keyboard as well to maintain symmetry. I don't know about the author but if the G15 keyboard came with a fully programmable 'number pad' like arrangement to the left of control and a number pad to the right of enter I would be totally OK with that.
I used to think I wanted a laptop with a number pad on it, then I saw one that actually had one, and hated it instantly. I feel bad for the poor saps that did get one.
Agreed. It is very hard today to find a cheap PC laptop without an accountant's keyboard. I don't even like them on desktops, a waste of space (for me).
I agree with this personally, but I did have a user demand a laptop with a built in numpad. She specifically said that a usb numpad would not cut it. It's not to have at least one model that features a numpad.
What's your point? She didn't say she wanted every laptop ever made to have a numpad. Wanting a Lenovo TrackPoint doesn't mean you want it on every laptop ever made, nor are you imposing it on anyone. Do you think it's wrong for Lenovo to put it on their laptops? Do you think they should stop so that they don't impose it on anyone?
The stupidest trend in laptop design is... having a screen, you know, because I just use my laptop to feed music into my sound system. I don't need a screen I'm not even going to watch. And the mic input? The webcam? Come ooooon, are the designers just that f.... stupid??? Why do they keep bloating laptops with a lot of useless features that just add weight, moving parts and create health problems in the long run???
This blogger does not know the market better than the large and profitable manufacturers selling into it. The manufacturers have real numbers backing their decisions – not subjective aesthetic and ergonomic hand-waving. If customers weren't choosing (and even paying extra for) for the numpad, it'd disappear quickly.