I'm not exactly a fanboy but I'd rather give my money to Corsair and ASUS before I give it to Gigabyte; or at least that was my mindset; Gigabyte may be slowly winning me over.
I have been thinking lately about getting a new keyboard. While thinking about what to get, I've been considering an 80% keyboard - I'm used to 100%.
My main reason for considering 80% is because I would like my WASD to be closer to my mouse. Then I questioned something... why do keyboards have the numpad on the right side? How is it practical with mice?
Especially for gamers and people who use computers for hours on-end, a numpad on the right is impractical and annoying. What modern-day benefit is there to having the numpad on the right?
The bigger-company keyboards I know of with the concept:
Gigabyte AORUS Thunder K7 (2014)
Microsoft Sidewinder X6 (2008)
When using a spreadsheet program such as Excel or Google Spreadsheets, people who use the numpad tend to use the mouse in their right hand and have their left arm stretched across the keyboard to use the numpad.
Imagine this with the numpad on the left side -- left hand moves far less in comparison (from home keys).
When gaming, the numpad is never really used -- other than ARMA series and perhaps using benchmarking/recording software (which will work as equally fine on the other side of the board).
It would probably be best to keep the arrow keys and home/delete/end etc. on the right hand side for reasons such as:
- with numpad on left, each hand gets an even amount of 'extra' keys (especially when typing)
- delete is used as commonly as backspace so close proximity is a good idea
- some games use WASD and arrow keys together and it's best to keep WASD for the left hand
Either way, I just thought that I should post this and offer some ideas that might hopefully come into effect one day.
I see it as not only a possible new market but also as a marketing attraction.