It was the design on MacBook's for almost 5 years. Apple rolled that change back in late 2020 but it will take other OEM's a while to update their available SKUs to match the Apple of today.

So that's where all this comes from. Not surprising. I saw that Dell announced a touchbar product. Guess they'll have to kill that too. This sort of slavish aping of Apple needs to stop.

My ex-boyfriend called me "insane", but I genuinely prefer ye olde 6-key arrow cluster from the Thinkpads of yore. I quickly got used to browsing with pgup and pgdown, now any keyboard without those keys adjacent to the arrows just feels wrong to me.

In any case, the keyboard on the Framework is fully replaceable. If there's significant enough demand for an inverted-T cluster, you can bet there are people who will make the replacement for it (if OEM doesn't get to it first).

And I hate the ThinkPad 6-key cluster because of accidentally hitting the pgup and pgdown buttons. I decapped both buttons because of it. Same with the the fn button next to ctrl.

Different strokes for different folks. I'm personally just glad that we were able to collectively hate the Touch Bar enough for Apple to '86 it.

Pedantry incoming, but “86” doesn’t need the apostrophe before it.

The etymology from what I remember comes from the fact that if asking for 86 of anything at once is impossible to provide.