> The industrial designers let loose on the Mac have screwed up most of the keyboards by cutting their function keys in half so the total depth of the keyboard was reduced by half a key. Why was this incredibly stupid?<p>It wasn't; Macs don't <i>use</i> function keys for anything (or, at least, anything touch-type-y.) They're there for compatibility with the few non-HIG apps that demand them (and now for Bootcamp), but mostly they've been repurposed into controls for very deliberate system actions (like summoning Expose or advancing a track on your music player) that you wish to trigger far <i>less</i> often than you want to type an @ symbol.