An improvement over Pi 500 in many ways, but adding keys to the right of heavily-used (r) Shift / Enter / Backspace would make it much harder to find these keys without looking at the keyboard.
The previous version also had half-height arrows that had some negative space ("not keys") above them, and so it was easier to position the fingers over the arrows just by feel; this one makes it harder.
I'd hope the next generation returns to the previous keyboard layout (which was almost perfect for me.)
> keys to the right of heavily-used (r) Shift / Enter / Backspace would make it much harder to find these keys without looking at the keyboard.
I'd think that people who prefer mechanical keyboards already have the muscle memory so that that isn't a problem.
Personally, I depend on Delete and Home/End/Page Up/Page Down for my text/code editing and find any keyboard without them to be deficient.
> people who prefer mechanical keyboards already have the muscle memory
The problem with that is that every mechanical keyboard is different, so that muscle memory needs a refresh with each new keyboard. More importantly, people who are used to Pi 400 or Pi 500 (non-plus) have a different muscle memory.
> I depend on Delete and Home/End/Page Up/Page Down
For me, Fn-⌫, Fn-←, Fn-→, Fn-↑ and Fn-↓, respectively, do the job. On my keyboard, Fn is the button in the lower left corner, so it's easy to find by feel, ⌫ is in top right corner so it's easy to find by feel, and the negative space above half-height arrows makes it easy to find the arrows too.