Apple Hates Caps Lock

By

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There’s nothing worse than randomly turning on Caps Lock in the middle of writTING A DOCUMENT AND SUDDENLY YOU TYPE LIKE THIS.

To combad that problem, it would appear that Apple has made it hard to turn on Caps Lock on its new thinline keyboards that shipped with the iMac. Wolf Rentzsch discovered the change:

I’ve discovered something shocking. An anti-Caps Lock conspiracy silently bubbling up from the darkest trenches inside Apple:

Apple’s Caps Lock key has undocumented anti-jab protection.

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.

He even shot a video to show how it works. Apple — they think of everything.

Via Daring Fireball

Image from Wikipedia

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32 responses to “Apple Hates Caps Lock”

  1. Jon says:

    Well, good Lord! Just tried it and you’re right! Amazing :-)

  2. Thom says:

    Brilliant. I’ve actually removed my caps lock key because I was so fed up of this.

  3. Ian says:

    I removed my caps lock key too. I’m counting the days to getting the new keyboard.

  4. Zang says:

    I’m not surprised. UI people have been talking about the uselessness of capslock for years, and have been itching to get rid of it (and other symbols like the tilde ) from the standard QWERTY keyboard for a while.

    Apple actually applies the same “timed keypress” for the eject key. A simple bump will not eject a disc, you’ve got to hold it down a second.

  5. joemsak says:

    They did this with the “EJECT” button, too. It took me a while to get used to it, and in fact, I thought my eject button was broken for a while! But I love it now!

  6. Ken says:

    Or you could just remap it to Control. >:)

  7. seth says:

    neat, i kinda want one of those new laptops now; which the wireless one had a numpad though :/

  8. Rich says:

    Didn’t Apple do this to the Eject key too ?

    I noticed a while ago you have to hold it down just a couple milli seconds longer now than you used to

  9. Jimmi says:

    Sweet! I wished they had that on the laptops. I have that problem with my iBook. The notebook keys are too small.

  10. imajoebob says:

    If somebody asks you why you bought a Mac, don’t bother with all the stability, virus resistance, quality stuff. Just tell them about this, and ask if this is the kind of thought they put into something so minor, how well do you think the big stuff works?

    “Sweat the details”

  11. fukijama says:

    Any chance they can retrofit our macs for this with a firmware update? :-)

  12. GoofyMonkey says:

    frrreeeeeeDDDOOOOMMM!

  13. sdude says:

    what the heck is wrong with the tilde? it’s shorthand for approx. (my understanding of it anyway). i have used it off and on for ~ 20 years. i feel like starting a “save the tilde” campaign

  14. KlausG says:

    The Japanese layout of the new keyboard not only features the “anti-jab protection” but also places the caps lock on the right side – in safe distance from the shift key.

  15. Steve says:

    Re the tilde, how will I navigate to my webspace on multi-user computers (http://server.com/~steve)
    Or my home directory when I scp: scp something.txt steve@server:~/somefolder/
    Or approximate my age? I am ~25

    Save the tilde!

  16. Tice says:

    There’s an easy solution to deactivate the CAPS-Lock key. Just open system preferences – keyboard & mouse – special keys (I guess) where you can deactivate it. Simple and good.

    http://blog.tice.de/beitrag.ph