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Comment by bArray | Hacker News Reader

> However, Hill said, he thought about putting a butterfly keyboard on a netbook when they were a viable product category in the late aughts.

I really want to see sub-11" notebooks again. They were super cool travel laptops.

> The dual lights would have eliminated shadows and provided even better illumination, but unfortunately, this effort proved too costly to make it into the final product.

Ridiculous. Function must be allowed to win sometimes.

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GPD has some. Particularly the GPD Pocket 4. 8.8" Notebook with a AMD HX 370 processor and up to 64GB RAM. Can even work as a KVM.

I have one and I love it, but damn do I hate the key layout on it. Which is a shame because they have saner layouts on some of their smaller offerings.

I hate that they deliberately obscure the keyboard in all their product pictures. I couldn't see what was wrong until looking at a review. Sounds great otherwise but that's disappointingly deceptive.

I wish such devices had hot-swappable plates and key caps to let us choose our own compromises. Key layout seems like such a trivial, almost cosmetic, aspect that can make a device a misery overshadowing much higher complexity/cost tech like the screen and internals.

Yeah, I don't have one but it is tempting. I was thinking maybe of using Kmonad or something to turn the ; key into some sort of layer shift if I got one. But I'm already pretty used to using key layers.

I think they did it that way to make a more usable keyboard for touch typing at that size? The smaller devices like the Win Mini seem to have more like thumb keys.

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