Apple's new keyboard makes caps lock hard to use 10 Oct 2007

Jonathan "Wolf" Rentzsch of Red Shed fame has unearthed a novel feature that's been added to Apple's new keyboard:

"Unique among the rest of the keys, Caps Lock doesn't activate immediately upon strike. There's a very small time window -- perhaps a quarter of a second -- where if you release the key inside the window, the keystroke is ignored."

This feature is intended to prevent accidental fat-fingering over the caps lock key, of course (something that is intensely frustrating when you are attempting to enter a case-sensitive password, for example). It may also, as Rentzsch points out, have been implemented to act as "a subtle nudge to those to abuse Caps Lock to TONE IT DOWN A LITTLE".

Here's a video of Rentzsch demonstrating the Caps Lock delay. As you'll see, he quickly strikes the caps lock key three times in a row without activating caps lock mode - thereby mimicking the fat-fingering scenario - before striking it slowly to activate it - thus mimicking intentional use of the key.

Now, you're probably thinking: "If you're deliberately going to make the caps lock key difficult to use, then why not just remove it from the keyboard altogether?". This is the postion of the CAPSoff organisation - an entity dedicated to urging hardware manufacturers to eradicate this feature from our keyboards. Yet, while we can certainly see the advantages of removing this pesky key, there are significant disadvantages too - as documented in a post we wrote last year on the effects of "Blasting caps".