We all know folks who are incredibly picky about something, usually something that doesn’t seem all that important to others. I have a friend who turns making coffee into a magnificent ritual: he gets his fancy-schmanzy beans custom-roasted (in small batches) from a special vendor, he uses a super-fancy grinder with just the right burrs and blades, he insists on filtered and PH-balanced and de-ionized water, he uses unbleached natural fiber filters to make the coffee in a (manual, of course) drip maker that deposits the coffee into a pre-heated carafe.
I’m not saying any of this to mock the guy; quite the opposite. He loves his coffee and has acquired an extremely discerning palate where a fine brew is concerned. He can taste any deviance from his (astronomically high) standard, and adamantly refuses to compromise on anything even hinting at the rinky-dink in coffee. Well, bully for and more power to him: we all tolerate any amount of mediocrity in this world and so anything that helps us to counter the prevailing spread of pedestrian mush is a good thing, indeed.
I like fine coffee, myself, but I’m just fine with pre-ground Peet’s and a Melitta. I’m also partial to good tea, but not to the point of buying rare harvests or frequenting posh tea vendors except for the occasional splurge. My daily staple is a solid Assam blend from Taylor’s of Harrogate, in big square teabags. It’s distinctly above average stuff, but more importantly, it can be tossed into the cart along with the rest of the groceries.
But I pursue my own snobberies. Computers, for one: I must have the latest and best. That’s why my SFCM & traveling companion is a 17" MacBook Pro of recent vintage, and my main home computer is a Mac Pro tower with tons of memory and hard drive space, connected to a 30" Apple Cinema Display.
I’m also fussy about headphones—themselves subject of a recent article in this space—which explains the Grado RS-1 cans I like to use for my digital piano and the Sennheiser HD 800s I use for regular music listening.
But I’m also fussy about something else: computer keyboards. I may be more demanding about them than anything else. I am notoriously difficult to please with a keyboard, but once I find one that pleases, I cleave to it with an almost religious-nut intensity. For example, back in the 1990s a company called NMB produced a keyboard they called "The Right Touch". Sillly name, but it was a marvelous beast characterized by a double spacebar that allowed you to use both thumbs independently of each other. More to the point, it had a beautiful scissor action (not those horrible spongy membrane affairs) that avoided being too obnoxiously clicky, too stiff, or too loose. It was just a pip of a keyboard all the way around. I wore out three in succession, in fact, before the company stopped manufacturing them. (Alas, build quality wasn’t up to design.)
Despite the praise heaped on the original IBM keyboards, I never really liked the gadgets. I thought they were just too loud and the keys too wiggly. A few years ago I bought the pricey Mathias Tactile Pro keyboard for the Mac; its selling/boasting point is its old-style IBM scissor action, plus rock-solid construction. All true. However, the doggone thing was loud enough to wake the dead and I just didn’t like typing on it. Too big and too deep and too wiggly. So it’s been gathering dust in the closet along with several other applicants who failed to make the grade.
Overall, Apple has been the King of Keyboards, save that awful period in the mid-1990s when they were producing dreck equal to the worst coming out of cheap Taiwanese sweatshops. Nor were those spongey clear-and-white-plastic models that accompanied iMacs and Mac Pros until recently all that great, either. But the magnificent Apple Extended Keyboard that accompanied my Mac SE still works—there’s not a broken key anywhere on it—and is still a pleasure to use, on those rare occasions when I fire up the SE to make sure that it remains alive. At $200 in 1980s dollars it was one of the most expensive keyboards ever produced, but it was built to last forever. However, you can’t use an AEK with a modern computer, given its long-obsolete Apple Desktop Bus technology. Besides, it’s monstrously huge.
I discovered at some point that I really preferred laptop-style keyboards. I’m a fast, very economical typist, having been trained by people who took typing seriously and who insisted on keeping extraneous motion to a minimum, even on the manual typewriters upon which I was taught. As a result I prefer lighter action to heavier, smaller keys to larger, shallower travel to deeper. The keyboard on the MacBook Pro models prior to the current generation—those silver-ish, recessed keys and near-silent operation—was one of my all-time favorites.
But I’ve found keyboard nirvana in the current Apple "chiclet" models. They fit my hand perfectly and the exceptionally shallow travel (with near-instantaneous rebound) suits me like no other. Recently I weaned myself of the idea that I needed a numeric keypad, and moved over 100% to the new wireless models—tiny little things, 11 inches wide and 5 inches tall, shorn of keypads and those funny "Home" and "End" keys, untethered by chords, and yet sturdy. A friend of mine got the wired version of the same keyboard with his new iMac, and it drove him absolutely up the wall. He never learned to type formally but has developed his own four-fingered technique that is is apparently dependent on the spacings of a full-sized slab keyboard. Without that he couldn’t find his way around. So I gave him one of my rejects (good quality but not up to my standards) and he’s happy.
I’ve also realized that using a full-sized keyboard has become a bit uncomfortable now, not because of the keyboard itself, but because of the long reach one has to make over to the mouse. The 11" span of the Apple wireless keyboard means that the mouse can be close at hand, requiring less movement from the shoulder or elbow. This can only be for the good.
Obviously I am not a candidate for one of those everything-but-the-kitchen sink "gaming" or "multimedia" keyboards with their blinking lights, tons of extra keys, and partridges in pear trees.
Among my contestants for keyboard hell, by the way, are any membrane-style keyboards with their horrid mush and indefinite actions. But first and foremost on my shit list are those big curved jobs. I suppose that the physical therapist types had a point about the angle of the hand to the wrist and therefore curved the thing in order to minimize carpal tunnel problems. But what they didn’t realize is that you don’t have to bend your hand at the wrist to use a regular keyboard. Mother nature took care of that already: if you position the hand and arm at a slight angle to the keyboard (with the hand straight at the wrist) the relative lengths of the fingers are perfectly suited to keep the hand properly in line on the home keys. As a result you’re probably less inclined towards repetitive stress problems on a regular keyboard. Besides, those curvy things always have membrane keys; don’t the designers realize that the thick, mushy response of those keyboards is probably harder on the hand than the crisp lightness of switch actions?
And there we have the sound of a keyboard snob in full mode, just like my coffee friend and his engraved-in-marble exclusivities.
Heaven
Hell
