I guess I misunderstood the OP to be asking about the special function keys - tab, shift, etc. Because those are all lower case on the Apple I’m typing on now, as well as the image you link. I agree with most - can’t remember ever seeing a keyboard where the letter keys were lowercase. That would look odd indeed.
I have four keyboards in easy sight right now, two Mac and two PC. All four use capitals for the letter keys (QWERTY etc.). The Mac keyboards use “tab”, “caps lock”, etc. The PCs use “Tab”, “Caps Lock”, etc.
irked.
All my four keyboards are in upper-case.
Another vote for a keyboard that has the letter keys in upper case and the function keys starting with an upper-case letter and then continuing lower case. Then again, it’s a German keyboard, so you’d expect the nouns to be capitalised anyway (“control” is “Steuerung” and becomes “Strg” on the key, etc.).
Seems there is no consistency here. Which surprises me, considering how much such things are normally standardised (hence the famous “Why do number pads on computers have the 1 on the bottom left but on phones on the top left?” question).
I’m on an upper case keyboard right now. All “standard” keyboard I’ve used have been upper case. There might be a few small, bluetooth/whatever keyboards that I have used that were lower case.
My computer is a chrome book that I specifically brought for the upcoming college semester. Hugh, maybe that is why it is in all lower case.
They are just ‘Keycaps’, at least when they are mechanical push buttons They are usually replaceable with whatever characters and colors you want to use. Maybe some company has made some unique keycaps only available from them, but you could probably print replacements anyway. I had to look at mine to see that the regular keys were all caps and the special keys all lower case. I rarely look at the keypad except for when I have to look for where they hid the Insert key (it’s the 0 key on the auxiliary pad dummy!)
The only time that I ever see a keyboard with lowercase letters is when I am using a virtual keyboard on a phone or tablet.
My keyboard is all-caps, including special function keys.
If I search for images of Chromebook keyboards, gobs of them have lowercase printing on the keycaps, regardless of who makes them. Lenovo, Acer, Asus, HP, and Dell all make Chromebook accessories, and they all have lowercase lettering on the keys. It might be a specification from Alphabet/Google that Chromebooks are supposed to look like that.
It’s apparently a Chromebook “thing.”
IBM Selectric typewriter has the letters in capitals, and also the words in capitals. I feel like it is yelling at me: BACKSPACE
Reddit user Scarecrow_Kayak had the absolute best answer in the reddit thread linked below.
“Because the other way would have been a large capital investment on their part.”
I think the connection between Chromebooks and lower case keyboards is Android aesthetic standards, including the normal Android font and the normal appearance of the standard Google Android soft keyboard.
A Chromebook physical keyboard is typically marked with exactly the same letter glyphs (including typeface and lower case) as the GBoard soft keyboard I’m using right now on my Android phone to type this comment.
The greatest innovation on Chromebook keyboards, though, is getting rid of the Caps Lock key. I mean, really, when was the last time you EVER intentionally used that, versus how many times have you accidentally hit it and screwed something up?
And no, I didn’t use it for “EVER”. It was easier to just hold down shift for four keystrokes (or six, for when I quoted it).
I have an Acer Chromebook, and I never noticed before this thread that every letter on it is lower case.
All the time, really. I find myself typing one-handed on a regular basis (Not for that reason, sicko. I have a clingy cat.). And I write a lot of code that needs all-caps for various reasons. Easier to hit caps lock than stretch my hand across the keyboard in various configurations.
At university and my first couple jobs as a programmer I mostly used keyboards that couldn’t even produce lower case letters.