I hate this. It's uncomfortable. If you aren't old enough to have used a good laptop before laptops could be thinner than two inches, you can think of modern laptop keyboards as the 21st century equivalent of a girdle. You give up a certain amount of comfort, but hey, at least you look sexy.
I guess we won't have comfortable laptop keyboards again until the electronics and battery are small enough to fit entirely under the palm rests and trackpad.
My wife does a lot of sewing and garment making. She has convinced me that a properly designed and fitted girdle is actually a net-benefit for people. The trouble is proper fit is hard at a mass scale, which is why women transitioned to bras, which also have notorious fit issues, but are at least manageable when mass produced.
I miss old laptop input devices, wish someone still made a laptop with a built in trackball too!
I personally would love a return to keyboards at the front edge of the laptop, with a side mounted trackball; but I doubt I'll see that.
Manual typewriters, though, had a /huge/ amount of travel, and since the travel provides the force to strike the type on to the paper, you really had to hammer on them.
Came here to say the same thing. But then I was stuck on keyboards that required bottoming out for many years. It's been a re-learning process to not bottom out on my fairly keychron k2. But, wow so pleasant to use.
This is interesting!. I learn typing in a VERY old mechanical typewriter, then in an electronic one, then in a computer keyboard.
You need to hammer the keys in the old typewriter, like hitting with all the force in the world. But in the electronic it was so soft! Then the computers come and was like in the middle.
I made my own mechanical keyboard, and looking at it, I bottom up around the "middle", not going full force. Also, I HEAR if I hitting it too hard, so I can "lower" the sound mid-tipyng! Cool to have feedback!
There were two IBM Selectrics in the back of the room, and everything else was manual. There was a schedule for the lucky two.
I think we had more than one Apple ][ for after-school signup at that point, but I'm not sure.
So I learned the traditional way with an egg timer and a spiral-bound exercise book on a stand. Curled fingers. I still type this way, and I can still do about 170+ wpm depending on how many cups of coffee I've had.
Later, this really helped me when I got an IBM Model F keyboard or Sun UNIX keyboard and when I would fly around Vi like a keyboard assassin it would amaze my colleagues. My current keyboard is a mechanical Ducky with Cherry MX Brown switches: https://www.duckychannel.com.tw/en/Ducky-One-Golden-grey-TKL
I have learned to touchtype about 80WPM in my teens, over 2 decades ago and I still have hard time not bottoming out or using right shift key.
I have been successful in re-learning to use dvorak instead of qwerty and to type in a tempo (ie. with equal intervals, using metronome), but the bottoming dynamic is much more basic than that, I think.
For several years, sometimes I slacked off and just typed on my Mac keyboard, and fingers would start getting sore again so I'd switch back to the mechs. Now I've apparently healed up a bit and a modest amount of laptop typing doesn't bother me, but I still bring out the mechs for more substantial work.
I eventually realised that you’re supposed to press them gently, like you might with a camera shutter, just past the actuation point. Now I type faster, it feels better, and it’s really quiet.
After getting a mechanical with high force keys (80g) and learned to type without bottoming out I find with every key press you get a bounce back, a bit of energy that sustains typing. It's like tiptoeing on a trampoline.
One other thing I like about mechs is that you get to feel the center of the keys, as they have a small depression in the middle. this helps align hands to the buttons and reduces mistyping. Flat and crowded laptop keys bad with centering.
There are silicon o-rings that you can place around the stem peg of the keycap. It's like a $15 mod, takes about maybe a half-hour for a whole keyboard. It will definitely dampen the sound of the key bottoming out and will be a lot quieter and remove the blunt "shock" in your fingertips of bottoming out.
It’s worth noting that for folks who don’t know proper typing technique (which is probably nearly everybody under the age of 40, as nobody really teaches it any more, at least in the countries where I’ve lived) it almost doesn’t matter what sort of mechanical switch you’re using, in terms of noise.
In my experience, the majority of mechanical keyboard noise for most folks doesn’t actually come from the switches at all; it comes from the keys noisily bottoming out on each keystroke.
My theory is that most folks these days learned to type on membrane keyboards where you have to bottom out the keys (often with quite a lot of force, if the keyboard is old), or else on a laptop’s scissor switches where you can’t avoid bottoming out due to the extremely short throw, and so everyone’s just typing with much more force than necessary and driving the keys all the way down to the backplate on every press because that’s what they had to do with the keyboards they learned on.
Which of course makes typing far less pleasant, and also much noisier! The complaints are totally understandable, from that perspective.
This also links into the “Massive travel time” comment; most folks push the keys much too far down while typing on mechanical keyboards!
Cherry MX Blue switches (as one example) actuate at 2mm, which is almost exactly the same distance as most (non-Apple) laptop scissor switches. The only reason that a mechanical keyboard would have “massive travel time” compared to a laptop keyboard is if you’re needlessly pushing the keys all the way down, when you actually only need a gentle tap on them.