[moltopoco]

Being able to replace the keyboard is especially wonderful because laptops are usually "region-locked". I know people who use relatively unpopular layouts relative to where they live, and it makes it harder to buy and much harder to sell their Macs.

[encom]

This curse extends to mechanical keyboards as well. There exists all sorts of fancy, beautiful and odd keycap sets... for Americans. Some times for German and French. If I get really lucky, I'll find some with a "Nordic" layout, which is an abomination that combines dk/se/no.

[gunalx]

Not a us user, but ended up with us and uk layout, just because they where easier to find. (also works fine for programming)

[dontlaugh]

The solution is to get blank keycaps. Then it doesn’t matter.

[happymellon]

> I know people who use relatively unpopular layouts relative to where they live

I will always loath the Mac UK keyboard layout. Wildly different than ISO and ANSI for absolutely no benefit.

[nomel]

what do you mean?

If you get the key caps, they're trivially swapped.

I use Dvorak, and I've swapped keys for every generation of keyboard over the last 10 years. Once swapped, the layout can be set system wide.

[Wingman4l7]

They're really not -- Mac scissor switches are pretty delicate, and it's easy to do damage to the tiny plastic nubs on the keycaps or the switches... and if you damage the metal retaining frame in any way, you're toast (Mac laptop keyboards are virtually unreplaceable, being buried in the "bottom" of the unibody chassis).

[LTL_FTC]

I think they mean different regions have physically different layouts. I supported users in different countries and know that French layouts are different than Hebrew layouts which are different from English layouts and so on. Trying to buy different key caps doesn’t give the user a native layout because the shapes of the layouts are somewhat different.