It’s a standard that Microsoft maintains. Like, “This is what keyboards for our platform should look like.” The only real place this gets enforced is laptops and maybe keyboards bundled with towers running Windows. It’s part of the requirements to get the little Windows sticker on your product and allows you to market the hardware with the OS. Beyond that, other manufacturers will usually implement the standard just to be on the same page.
But who is this for? New laptops?
Apple has a closed system, so they can use whatever layout they want, but how can Microsoft require that manufacturers will implement this key?
I know that it happened before with the Win key, but I’m too young to know the details of how that became the norm.
It’s a standard that Microsoft maintains. Like, “This is what keyboards for our platform should look like.” The only real place this gets enforced is laptops and maybe keyboards bundled with towers running Windows. It’s part of the requirements to get the little Windows sticker on your product and allows you to market the hardware with the OS. Beyond that, other manufacturers will usually implement the standard just to be on the same page.