Why Chromebook keyboards have lowercase letters

At that time, many phones and tablets already had simplified modern keyboards - Android phones launched with a lowercase setup when they debuted in 2008 - but most laptops and desktops could still date their keyboard design back to the first commercially successful typewriter, 1874's Remington No. 1, which could only type in uppercase characters. "If you look at many modern PCs or laptops, their keyboards still carry a lot of legacy from those early computing days: all-caps keyboards, insert keys, home, page up and down, caps lock," Donny says.

The team's goal was to come up with a more modern, less confusing keyboard that addressed a number of these legacy features. For example, Chromebooks don't have "Sys Req" keys, and that concerning "Break" key is nowhere to be seen. And there are just a pair of repeated keys - control and alt - on each side of the keyboard instead of a confusing array of function and platform-specific keys.

But there is one key that the team added: the Everything Button. Located on the left side of the keyboard (where you'll usually traditionally find the Caps Lock key), the Everything Button started out as a search key, complete with a magnifying glass icon, before shifting to its modern iteration: a solid circle surrounded by a ring.