I am currently having to get used to a British keyboard, after having used American for a long time. Certainly it does not have as many issues as the Canadian one, but I do agree that it is stupid that the left shift key is so small (barely bigger than a normal letter key), whereas the right shift, that I hardly ever use, is huge (almost the length of three normal keys). If the | key had been put on the right, taking room from the right shift, both shift keys could still have been pretty much double sized. Surely nobody cares that much where the | key is located. You are not going to use it in normal touch typing of text.
Also, why has British keyboard felt the need to move the double quotes to above the 2, and put the @ above the apostrophe instead? Anf how often do British typists really need a key for ¬? So far as I can see, the only symbol that British typists really need that Americans do not is the £. Yes, that needs to be fitted in somewhere, but the rest of the differences seem quite pointless.
Just thank your lucky stars that French Canadians don’t use AZERTY.
Aside from accents, the keyboard has things like guillemets (« and »). I don’t think your average francophone’s head is going to implode if they see a sentence using " ".
Can you buy a US computer? It’s not like the power standards or plugs are any different, so there shouldn’t be any adjustment besides changing the regional settings (but not the keyboard layout). Import fees?
ETA: I wish the common keyboard here was the Canadian Multilingual Standard. I actually prefer it, but will live with the US Extended keyboard mapping on the Mac because of its unicodicity.
No, but it is the common way to make quote marks in French, so it makes sense that it be easily accessible. :dubious:
I was in Italy this spring, and sometimes using a computer with an Italian keyboard layout. Which (while being QWERTY) has plenty of characters in (to me) strange places, but which are apparently quite common in European keyboards; it even has the open and closed parentheses over 8 and 9 instead of over 9 and 0 (as the US, Canadian French and Canadian multilingual keyboards). It was confusing to me at first, but after a while I adapted.
Well, Future Shop and Best Buy assured me they couldn’t even ORDER US versions of the keyboards, and one of my friends at a mom and pop laptop store told me that the suppliers simply make one “Canadian” model of their laptop. This seems to be an innovation which has taken off in the past 12 months or so, since last year I didn’t notice this as I went strumming through laptop section at F.S.
And yes, Macs seem to exclusively use the US layout. You’re SOL if you want a sucky keyboard on a Macbook.
If this is something that’s happened in the past year or so, it makes sense that I haven’t seen it. I haven’t been in many computer stores for the last 18 months.
Well, I just went cruising through TigerDirect and Future Shop websites, and all the keyboard pictures I saw appeared to be standard US QWERTY keyboards.
Their screen shots are from US model laptops. I came close to a screaming match with the man at the Best Buy, waving my ipad in his face, showing him how the images on their website did NOT match the keyboard in store. I told him it was a bait and switch, as hyperbole is one of my many marketable qualities.
Much to my surprise, most of the laptops and desktops at the Yonge and Dundas Future Shop had the Canadian Multilingual Keyboard (CMK). There was a sprinkling of models which had the US keyboard; and some accessory keyboards, like the “Logitech Gaming Keyboard”, had the US keyboard as well. The Apple products all had the US keyboard, as I expected.
It was a similar situation at the Sony store in the Eaton Centre. Most units had the CMK, a few didn’t.
I get the impression that the US-keyboard units were remnants of previous sales lines, but I didn’t ask. I should have, just to see what the salespeople were instructed to say.
At the Apple store, it was all US keyboards, and it was also insanely crowded, so I didn’t stick around. I’m going to call them to see whether they are going to implement the CMK on Canadian Apple products. If there is indeed some sort of government directive requiring the CMK, one would think that Apple would be selling them as well. Perhaps it’s a Windows/Microsoft thing?
I called Apple. The agent who answered confirmed that there’s just an “English” keyboard and a “French” keyboard, but did not have any info on exactly which layouts either keyboard used. I know from experience that the “English” keyboard is the US ANSI one, and I believe that the “French” keyboard would be the legacy Canadian French one, which appears from the Wikipedia article to be an ISO layout. But I’m just guessing there.
Edit: I’m no longer guessing. Here’s an Apple support article showing the available keyboard layouts. The Canadian French keyboard is a QWERTY keyboard built on the ISO layout, as is the “International English” keyboard. When I was shoosing a software keyboard mapping for my Mac, I did not see the Canadian Multilingual Standard. If it exists in the future, I presume it would use a hardware keyboard similar to that of the International English keyboard, with different keycaps.
Edit: what kind of company has their sales lines open at 8:45 PM on the Sunday of a three-day holiday weekend?
There likely isn’t any governmental directive; it’s probably the hardware companies wanting to offer a single keyboard for the whole Canadian market, to simplify things for them. Although if Apple offers US hardware in both the US and English Canadian market, and Canadian French hardware in French-speaking locales, it works just as well.
Yeah. There is one single solitary provider of Macbooks, and what? 10 or 12 players on the PC market? It seems to me Apple is in the position, by economies of scale, to make a laptop JUST for Quebec, and a US english one for the rest of us.
I’m just happy I got this Sony, though if it ever breaks down and they give me one with a CMK, as part of my extended warranty, you better believe I’ll lose my shit. :mad:
No hits on “keyboard” for anything remotely applicable in a search of the Justice Canada laws and regulations site, so probably a manufacturer decision.
