I don't understand this obsession for backlit keyboards I've been reading about a lot lately on forums. It definitely looks nice but its just a battery drain and I assume most HN people don't look at their keys. I always keep mine off for the sake of my battery.
Have you measured the battery life difference? I'm pretty sure each lit key has a fibre optic lead, with all the keys going to a single white LED. That should be a draw of about 120mW, which is pretty tiny compared with the couple of watts the rest of the computer is drawing.
I pretty much love my current laptop, but I still do miss the backlit keys of my old powerbook.
backlit keyboard aren't just for looking nice. they're for working at night in dark rooms. before touch typing you need to glance quickly at your hand's position above the keys, to make sure your hand position isn't transposed slightly up, down, left, right--which happens easily when you're blinded by a monitor in the dark, and the key bed is pitch black. yes, you can fold down your monitor till the light illuminates the keys, squint while you orient your hand, then raise the monitor to eye-level...but that is a distraction to workflow when hacking at night. way too much effort just for checking hand orientation. backlit keys solve that problem, which is one of the most serious 1st world problems facing rich people with nice computers today.
That's why the F and J keys have small bumps you can feel so you can position your hands for touch typing. The 5 key in the numeric keyboard also has one of these.
The backlight can be useful for the function keys or whatever, but touch typing does not need any light.
people who work in the dark, but have not achieved total union with the keyboard, appreciate the backlight. forced battery drain isn't an issue: turn off the light if you don't want.
do f and j bumps enable you to touch transcribe this string?
>}[\|:{%^&?`~]*();"'!@_+-=#$,./<
not for me. these keys are the bottlenecks that break my flow and force me to think for a few moments about where things are.
your tactile union with your keyboard may be 100%, but mine is more like 80%. congrats if you've mastered chopsticks, but fork is a no-brainer. i admire the simplicity of those little f and j bumps, but they're just no match for a glance.
why not a choice: a backlight to turn on if you want, off if you don't? i don't want a backlight on all the time either. if i'm banging out email, no need. but if i'm coding, or something else that requires lots of special characters and finger-fu, then a backlight is handy.
