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Comment by Modified3019 | Hacker News Reader

>Somewhat famous for not including arrow keys because Steve Jobs wanted to encourage developers to use the mouse instead

You know, with Jobs, the more I learn about that guy, the more I don’t care for him.

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He was right to do so. Give people an easy way out of designing for a new interface and they won't design for it. It's the same reason why they didn't do a stylus for iPhones and iPads early on. If they had, the overwhelming "touch" design language would have favored small stylus size targets instead of large finger sized ones. Similarly, when they shipped USB on the iMacs, that was the only peripheral port for the first 2 versions. And when they finally added more than USB, it was to add the new Firewire, not to add any legacy ports back.

Would the Wii have done as well with motion controlled games if defaulting to a playstation style controller was doable out of the box? How many pieces of old software and technology stay around despite better modern replacements because defaulting to the familiar original is easier?

Not everything new is obviously better, and new doesn't mean it should necessarily replace what came before. But new needs dedication to giving it a fair shake, and sometimes that requires going all in on the new and making going back to the old difficult.

And in response, a market for numeric keypads with arrow keys was born.

You can focus on the one thing that aggravates you, or your can focus on everything that he got done during the arc of his career. Like it or not, he helped define today's world of computing.

Eh, not really? In response, the _next_ Apple keyboard did have arrow keys. It was clearly a mistake.

I didn’t read it that way at all. If the keyboard without arrow keys had succeeded in setting the norm that developers rely on the mouse for input, then presumably it had done its job, and it was now safe to release a keyboard with arrow keys.

The Apple UX isn't much better than the often criticized Linux UX. In fact, sometimes it is worse (maximizing windows comes to mind). An opinionated system can be ok if the designer's opinion happens to match yours. Otherwise it can cause frustration.

Impossible to not read this in Norm’s nasal Canadian drawl.

One also wonders WTF Apple has against Delete keys. It's infuriating. Mac laptops and small Apple keyboards have only a Backspace key mislabeled "delete," and no real Delete key.

And, despite years of complaints, Apple pettily refused to address this even when physical media became obsolete and freed up the Eject key. They made this into... a baffling "lock" key or something if I remember correctly.

And even worse... when Eject existed, Apple put a HARDWARE delay on it; so you couldn't even remap it to be Delete. Why impose an insurmountable delay on an Eject key? Were people being killed by accidentally-ejected CDs? And if so, why didn't Apple simply make Eject a Delete key, with Eject being a secondary function accessible only with a modifier key... solving two problems at once?

Hold the function key to change delete/backspace. It is actually nice once you get used to it.

C-d works too and is easier to type.

Two hands to delete a character is NOT nice. Why on earth would you want that?

Nor is this combo marked on the keyboard, so most people don't know about it. They end up arrowing across characters and then backspacing them away, or using the mouse for everything.

And finally: The point about the Eject key stands.

It comes up most often when I'm updating a string. I may want to backspace a couple characters and then, possibly after entering new characters, delete the other direction. I'm already using multiple hands/keys constantly so no big deal. Keeps the theme of removing characters on the same key.

Yeah. And if Apple design was so great, then why didn't we have separate copy+cut+paste keys, and undo+redo keys from the start? For example. Or even a help key.

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