– Lenovo reduced the keyboard width on 14-inch ThinkPads from 28.5 cm to 27.5 cm starting with the T14 Gen 3.
– This shrink harmed European ISO layouts, shrinking frequently used keys like “Ü” and “Ä” to just 13 mm instead of the standard 16 mm.
– After years of complaints, Lenovo redesigned the keyboard for the T14 Gen 7.
– The fix: a less wide Enter key allowed two of the previously shrunken keys to return to the standard 16 mm width.
ThinkPad keyboards are well known for their comfort, but ever since the Lenovo ThinkPad T14 Gen 3 came out in 2022, European ThinkPad users in particular had a complaint. That specific model brought not only the return to narrower 16:10 screens, but also a new, slightly narrower keyboard layout.
Changes to Keyboard Dimensions
In total, Lenovo reduced the width of their keyboard on 14-inch models from 28.5 cm to 27.5 cm. The extra one cm was gained by shrinking keys at the right edge of the keyboard. On US-ANSI style layouts, the ones with the small enter key, this worked well, as pretty much all keys still had a normal size and only special keys were slightly smaller.
Impact on European-ISO Layouts
On European-ISO layouts, though, this meant that the four keys to the left of the big Enter key were shrunken down, being only 13 mm wide instead of the standard key-cap size of 16 mm. This hit especially some countries like Germany hard, where frequently used “Umlaut” keys, like “Ü” and “Ä” were shrunken.
After four years and much complaining, it seems Lenovo has finally listened. With the new Lenovo ThinkPad T14 Gen 7, which we recently reviewed, Lenovo changed their European ISO layout. The new model has a less wide Enter key, which means that Lenovo was able to increase the width of two of the formerly shrunken keys could be increased to the standard width – in the case of the German layout we used, the frequently used “Ü” and “Ä” keys are bigger.