As you may have heard or noticed, the new MacBook Air models do not have a separate Power key on the top case like all the other MacBook/MacBook Pros. Due to space constraints, the Power key is now part of the keyboard, and takes the upper right position, previously reserved to the Eject key. You can see a detail in this photo taken by Ars Technica (at page 5 of this article):
After reading about this change, I mistakenly thought that the upper row of keys in the new MacBook Air had now one more key, and consisted of 15 keys instead of 14.
On closer examination of various photos, I stand corrected: they still have 14 keys — it’s their layout and functions that have shifted.
Here’s a photo of the old MacBook Air’s top row of keys:
(Click to enlarge)
Left to right we find:
- Esc key
- F1 / decrease brightness
- F2 / increase brightness
- F3 / Exposé
- F4 / Dashboard
- F5 / decrease keyboard brightness
- F6 / increase keyboard brightness
- F7 / previous audio track
- F8 / Play-Pause
- F9 / next audio track
- F10 / Mute
- F11 / decrease volume
- F12 / increase volume
- Eject
Now let’s take a look at the new MacBook Air (the 11.6″ model):
(Click to enlarge)
The photo is darker and less clear (maybe this photo from Engadget is clearer), but here’s the key layout (changes are in bold italic):
- Esc key
- F1 / decrease brightness
- F2 / increase brightness
- F3 / Exposé
- F4 / Dashboard
- F5
- F6 / previous audio track
- F7 / Play-Pause
- F8 / next audio track
- F9 / Mute
- F10 / decrease volume
- F11 / increase volume
- F12 / Eject
- Power key
See what’s happened? Since the new MacBook Air models no longer have a backlit keyboard, the keyboard controls for keyboard brightness have gone, and more than half of the top row of keys has been redefined.
On a tangential note, I’m also wondering: since we’ll have Mission Control in Mac OS X 10.7 Lion and (from what I’ve inferred by the October 20 keynote) the Exposé and Dashboard functions will be unified, I guess that soon the two separated function keys won’t be much useful.
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