I've written about my struggles to find a good PC laptop before. After literally years of searching, it looks like Lenovo has stepped up to the plate and finally created the machine I crave. The new ThinkPad X1 Carbon, a high-resolution, Haswell-equipped update to 2012's Ivy Bridge-based model looked just about perfect.

The machine looks glorious in just about every regard. Fully decked out, it has a 2.1-3.3 GHz two core, four thread Core i7-4600U processor, 8GB RAM, a 14-inch 2560×1440 multitouch screen, 801.11ac, 9 hours of battery life, and a fingerprint reader. It all weighs in at under 3 lbs. It's a sleek, good-looking machine, and I'd buy one in an instant...

... if it weren't for one thing. The new X1 Carbon has what Lenovo is calling an "Adaptive Keyboard." Here's a picture of it:

I admit, I'm very picky about keyboards and their layouts, but golly gosh. Let us marvel together at its non-standardness. The gimmick of this keyboard is the row above the number keys, the place where the function keys should sit. The markings on this strip change according to the mode it's in. It can show a bunch of function key labels—F1 through F12—or media keys, or volume/brightness/etc. buttons, or whatever else is appropriate. I'm not entirely clear on all the ins and outs of its operation. Lenovo says that the options will vary according to the program you're running, but I'd have to use it to know just how well that works.

That these aren't hardware buttons is a bit awkward, though. I'm a touch typist, and as such, I use almost all of the keys on my keyboard without looking at them. This includes the function keys. But I can't really do that if the keys will change meaning of their own accord. Even if they didn't change meaning, the lack of discrete keys and tactile feedback would tend to impede touch usage.

If that's as far as it went, it probably wouldn't be too terrible. I mean, sure, I would prefer real keys, but I do get the point. On most laptop keyboard layouts, the function keys are heavily overloaded, and the non-function-key operations aren't particularly memorable. Using a bit of technology to make the labeling clearer is a fair idea.

Nothing where it should be

But it's the rest of the keyboard that really blows my mind. For example, the removal of the Caps Lock key and the insertion of Home and End keys in its place.

The Caps Lock key has its detractors, and it's true that it's led to far more pieces of online shouting than anyone would like. I do actually use it for legitimate things from time to time, though. Various programming languages have a policy of naming certain things with all capitals, and rather than bouncing from Shift key to Shift key to type out long all-caps words, I'll just use Caps Lock and type normally.

And let's be honest here. Caps Lock is a fantastic key. It's cruise control for cool. It's probably the best key on the keyboard.

The Adaptive Keyboard does seem to have Caps Lock—there's an indicator LED on the Shift key. So it's not that the keyboard lacks the feature entirely. It just changes the way it's invoked. And that's just awkward. It's the same with the placement of the Home and End keys. I'm sure they work there, but again, it's awkward.

The reason it's awkward is that in spite of being a touch typist, I don't really know where the keys are. In fact, there's research that suggests that because I'm a touch typist, I don't really know where the keys are. I don't consciously think about the physical position of the keys. My fingers just know where to move.

So for Caps Lock, I don't think "move my left little finger one key to the left." I just think "Caps Lock." And on the Adaptive Keyboard, that won't work. That same thought will result in me pressing End.

The Home and End keys themselves fall in a similar boat. I don't think of them on my left little finger. I just reflexively, intuitively press them with my right hand.

Unwelcome evolution

In fairness, these particular keys are often subject to poor positioning on laptop keyboards. There was a time that laptops would include the sextet of page navigation keys—Delete, Insert, Home, End, Page Up, and Page Down—in a three-by-two block, just as you'd find on a full-size keyboard. The keys might be a little smaller, and perhaps they'd be located above the main keys rather than off to the right, but they'd have the same positioning relative to one another, so they would be easy to get accustomed to.

Over the years, that block of six keys has been broken up and scattered hither and yon. The X1's previous keyboard design put four of the keys—Home, End, Insert, and Delete—in a row at the top right, with Page Up and Down positioned around the cursor keys (old Lenovo keyboards put Back/Forward Web buttons around the cursor keys, which I much prefer).

The Lenovo Helix's keyboard distorted the sextet further still. Page Up and Down remain down by the cursor keys, but the group of four is now a group of three: Home, End, and Delete. If you want Insert, you'll need to use Fn-Delete.

As such, the new X1 keyboard is just the latest evolution, if we can call it that, of that six-key block. Insert appears to be missing entirely (though it's possible that it's invoked with Fn-Delete, as on the Helix). Home and End are on the left, using the wrong hand. Page up and down stay by the cursor keys.

Other keys are arbitrarily moved around. Escape no longer sits in a row with the function keys; it's now to the left of 1. That's where Backtick/Tilde should live; they're now down on the bottom, between Alt and Ctrl. On the Helix, Print Screen is put in that same spot. Like insert, it appears to be missing entirely from the new X1 keyboard—though it's possible it's been relegated to the "adaptive" keys.

Another pair that deserve explicit mention: the Backspace and Delete keys. Because the block of six page navigation keys is gone, Delete has been squeezed in adjacent to Backspace. How many people are going to end up hitting Delete when they stretch their pinky to the top right corner to hit Backspace? I don't know for sure, but I'd guess it's going to be basically everybody.

Pretty much every key on the keyboard is there for a reason

Ultimately, the new X1 keyboard is a mess. I think these kind of keyboard games betray a fundamental misunderstanding of how people use keyboards. Companies might think that they're being innovative by replacing physical keys with soft keys, and they might think that they're making the keyboard somehow "easier to use" by removing keys from the keyboard. But they're not.

There are three points here. First, as already mentioned, skilled keyboardists don't know where the keys actually are. Moving the keys away from their innately assumed positions, therefore, produces a keyboard that's hard to use. Moving the keys forces the skilled typist to think about where keys are and how to use them, and that entirely defies the point of being a skilled typist. I appreciate that not everyone is a skilled typist, but come on. The X1 is a high-end, expensive machine. I daresay that, were it not for the keyboard, it would find favor with, for example, software developers and IT professionals, almost all of whom are fluent typists.

Second, some people do actually use the keys that get removed. The Break key is missing from many laptop keyboards these days, for example. I'm not going to pretend that the Break key is a key you use every single day, but it's not useless, either. For example, Windows' ping command, when used with the -t switch (endless pinging until stopped) lets you type Ctrl-Break to print the current stats without ending the pinging (as opposed to Ctrl-c, which prints stats and ends the pinging). This isn't the most important thing ever, but it's nonetheless useful to be able to do.

It's the same with other little-used keys. I use the PuTTY ssh client on Windows, and PuTTY uses Shift-Insert as its paste keystroke (it can't use Ctrl-v, because that gets passed through to the remote system). No Insert key means no pasting with the keyboard. I'm sure some people never use Print Screen to capture the screen. I use it all the time! Removing these keys from the keyboard simply makes the keyboard less useful.

No keyboard is an island

The final issue is that the keyboard is, in general, very hard to upgrade, because it's awfully entrenched. Anyone who's tried to learn, for example, the Dvorak layout will probably have discovered this. The benefits of the Dvorak layout aren't well proven (if they exist at all), but some people find the layout more comfortable to use. The trouble is that most people find, from time to time, that they have to use computers that aren't their own. This means that they have to switch between Dvorak and QWERTY, and this switching can be very jarring (especially during the learning phase).

This is a big problem for anyone trying to innovate. The X1's Adaptive Keyboard may have a superior layout to a regular keyboard (I don't think that it does, but for the sake of argument, let's pretend that it does), but that doesn't matter. As long as I have to use regular keyboard layouts too, the Adaptive Keyboard will be at a huge disadvantage. Every time I use another computer, I'll have to switch to the conventional layout. The standard layout has tremendous momentum behind it, and unless purveyors of new designs are able to engineer widespread industry support—as Microsoft did with the Windows keys, for example—then their innovations are doomed to being annoyances rather than improvements.

This is something that all PC manufacturers are essentially guilty of, too. Take a look at the 2012 Acer Aspire S7. It discards the function key row entirely (instead doubling up the number key row), and squishes Tilde in next to Caps Lock.

Innovation should be sympathetic, not disruptive

Keyboard innovation can be done—and done well—but it has to be innovation that is in service of the keyboard's purpose, not opposed to it. One very old example of this is IBM's famous butterfly keyboard, back when Big Blue owned the ThinkPad line. The butterfly keyboard of the ThinkPad 701c was a remarkable contraption that enabled the keyboard to be wider than the laptop itself, enabling IBM to preserve a more conventional keyboard layout. Rather than using innovation to break expectations, the butterfly keyboard used innovation to help preserve expectations.

More recently, many laptops now ship with backlit keys. In addition to looking exciting, many find this feature invaluable when typing in otherwise gloomy conditions; it helps them find keys on the keyboard and makes it easier to familiarize oneself with, and orient oneself on, the keyboard. As with the butterfly keyboard, this is innovation that doesn't undermine expectations.

Good keyboards are standard keyboards. Keyboards that don't break my intuitive expectations. Keyboards that maximize the value of my touch typing expertise and let me switch effortlessly to other systems. This means having all the keys in their regular positions, and when keys must be moved for space constraints, at least keeping the relative positions of related keys correct.

Lenovo's engineers may be well-meaning in their attempts to improve the keyboard. But they've lost a sale as a result. The quest for the perfect laptop continues.