Canadian Macbook Air - Bilingual Keyboard?

volvik said:

Can someone in Canada confirm that when ordering an Air and you select English that ends up with an English only keyboard??

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I have the 13" Macbook Air since august 2012, I bought it on the canadian Apple Store with the english keyboard and I can confirm that it's a EN only keyboard with no accents, or others special characters.

Exactly like this one: http://images.anandtech.com/reviews/mac/macbookair2012/DSC_7677.jpg

Hope it helps

You always have the choice. If you choose the english keyboard, I confirm it's going to be exactly like the one pictured in the link above. Otherwise you'd have a different Return key with Ç / È / À / É keys around it.

You can also tell by the SKU. If it ends with "LL/A" it's an English keyboard, french ends with "CA/A" or starts with "Z0".

EDIT: Using the french canadian bilingual keyboard myself, I had never noticed how the english keyboard had almost no icon and simply has words like "shift", "caps lock", "tab", "delete" and "return" written on keys. Here's a bilingual keyboard for comparison:



Maybe it's because I'm used to it but I think it looks better with icons instead of words.

pgiguere1 said:

You always have the choice. If you choose the english keyboard, I confirm it's going to be exactly like the one pictured in the link above. Otherwise you'd have a different Return key with Ç / È / À / É keys around it.

You can also tell by the SKU. If it ends with "LL/A" it's an English keyboard, french ends with "CA/A" or starts with "Z0".

EDIT: Using the french canadian bilingual keyboard myself, I had never noticed how the english keyboard had almost no icon and simply has words like "shift", "caps lock", "tab", "delete" and "return" written on keys. Here's a bilingual keyboard for comparison:

Image

Maybe it's because I'm used to it but I think it looks better with icons instead of words.

Click to expand...

That's interesting. It seems like there are separate, dedicated keys for some accented vowels.

kylera said:

That's interesting. It seems like there are separate, dedicated keys for some accented vowels.

Click to expand...

Yes, it's way faster than having to hit two keys to write a single character. You still have to use the key on the left of Ç (the one with ¨/^/`) to achieve some less common accented characters though (ê,â,î,ë,ï).

The thing I like less about a french keyboard is that some characters used a lot in programming are harder to type. For example you have to hit Option+some key to get [],{} and <> characters, which is kind of annoying.

Keyboards in Canada

English Only:
- purchasable in every province other than Québec.

Canadian multi standard keyboard:
- only can be bought online (apple.com) or in a store in Québec (not sure with New Brunswick)
- accent keys. just like the post above. (i have it on my air)