The recently introduced MacBook and MacBook Pro are truly beautiful machines. Apple has treated them to many design elements they introduced with the MacBook Air, such as rounded corners and a slim aluminum body. But they’ve also put two things in the MacBooks I could have done without: a glossy screen and a black keyboard.
Glossy screens are a computer’s nail polish
Admittedly, the glossy screens look great. They’re really shiny, the colors pop out at you and they certainly get the oohs and aahs of many. But even if they look great, they’re a nightmare to look at. A screen’s job is to display what’s in front of you, not behind you. But that’s exactly what glossy displays do in any lighting condition brighter than a candle. Any which way you tilt the screen, it’ll perfectly mirror your surroundings and make it hard to see what’s actually on the screen. And the darker the screen’s contents is, the worse this effect gets.
And being able to tilt the screen to avoid reflections, as Phil Shiller allegedly pointed out to MacLife, isn’t a solution either. Since you’re looking at the screen at all times, something will reflect and it doesn’t really matter what it is.
Black keyboards should be a thing of the past
In the PC world, black keyboards still abound. It’s probably because people tend to think they look slick. But from an ergonomic point of view, black keys with white characters on them are a strain on the eye. Try reading white text on a black background on your monitor and you’ll know what I mean. It’s pretty much been established that black or dark grey text on white background is optimal for reading, and, coincidentally, that’s the way word processors, editors and most websites display their text. So why on earth would you want to have it the other way around on a keyboard?
I’ve been using an Apple Aluminum Keyboard for some time now, and quite frankly it’s the best keyboard I’ve had so far. It has a great feel to it, you hardly need any pressure to depress the keys, yet they still have a very distinct pressure point. They’re also great to look at, since they have a matte surface that doesn’t show reflections and the dark grey of the keys against the off-white background is perfect. They keyboard’s low profile also reduces wrist strain.
And now, after Apple seemed to have gotten over black keyboards (they used them on the CRT iMacs and previous PowerBooks), they’re back again. It reminds me that Apple is first and foremost a design company and often usability issues have to take a back seat to better looks. Admittedly, the black keyboard looks nice on the new machines. But the aluminum on the PowerBooks and the previous-generation MacBook Pros looked nice, too, and they were better to look at. Even a dark grey keyboard with off-white characters would have been better than the stark black/white contrast they’ve chosen this time.
This may be mostly a non-issue for touch typers. But if you tend to look back and forth between the screen and the keyboard like I do, your eyes will constanty have to adjust back and forth to the inverted contrast. I’ll bet we’ll be reading lots of reports of people developing headaches when working their shiny MacBooks.
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dude but the keyboard characters light up! how are you going to make them light up black