Atelier Winsonli

Was playing with the current Penryn MacBook Pros at Broadway today. Noticed that the Penryn keybard is updated. The Penryn MacBook Pro has been released for quite some time (since 26 February) and should be replaced by new MacBook Pros in October 2008.

The functions keys on the Penryn MacBook Pro are revised:

Penryn Function Keys

Santa Rosa Function Keys

Apart from the captions F1, F2, etc. being smaller and located on the lower right corner, the following changes have been made:

1. F1 & F2 remains unchanged. Screen brightness control.
2. Keyboard backlight brightness control is F5 & F6 on Penryn; F8, F9 & F10 on Santa Rosa.
3. Volume control is F10, F11 & F12 on Penryn; F3, F4 & F5 on Santa Rosa.
4. F3 & F4 activates Exposè and Dashboard on Penryn.
5. Number lock key (F6) on Santa Rosa is not included on Penryn.
6. Playback controls are included on the Penryn, keys F7, F8 & F9.
7. I don’t know what the F7 key on Santa Rosa does.

Improvement? I don’t think so. Most of us would check the “use F1, F2, etc keys as standard function keys in system preferences. That means if we want to volume up on the Santa Rosa, we would have to hold the fn key (keyboard lower left) and press F5.

Santa Rosa Keyboard

Now there’s a problem. On the Santa Rosa keyboard, I can press both the fn key and volume up key (F5) with one hand. However, on the Penryn one, I have to do so with two hands, as the buttons are too far apart.

I have average sized hands, and the furthest button I can press while holding the fn key with my right hand is the F8 key. (I can touch the F9 key but it feels kind of awkward). That means frequently used keys should be located on the left, before the F8 key. The keyboard backlight brightness control, a key which I never use, is found on the Penryn as keys F5 & F6. The most frequent key I use, the volume control, is set as F11 - F13. I personally do not like this at all.

Apple made the Penryn function keys more difficult to use. I feel that Apple’s design is becoming less and less user friendly (or intuitive as they say, their selling point). There is one good thing about the Penryn keyboard though. The number lock function is removed. No one actually uses number lock on a notebook keyboard.

Penryn Keyboard - no number pad keys

Santa Rosa Keyboard - number pad keys present

The keyboard looks cleaner this way. However, I would still prefer the Santa Rosa keyboard for it has better positioned function keys.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 29th, 2008 at 10:50 am and is filed under Apple. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.