I’m French, and I’m Switching to a QWERTY Keyboard

And it feels like learning to type again

Photo by Ilya Pavlov on Unsplash

I remember the day I had to buy a Magic Keyboard at Apple in New York City. My 2016 MacBook Pro got a few keys stuck (thank you butterfly keyboard…), so I had to buy a keyboard to make sure I could work in the next few days until I could find the right moment to send my laptop for repair. We all know that New York City is a diverse city. I was confident about the fact that they would have a few French AZERTY keyboards lying around.

I was wrong. When I asked the Apple employee for a French keyboard, he looked at me surprised and said: “What’s that?”

The keyboard needed to be ordered and would take 3 or 4 days to get to New York. I decided to send my MacBook for repair instead, as I assumed it would take shorter than that anyway.

So I went to the Genius Bar of that same Apple Store and asked for the keyboard replacement. I asked if it could be done quickly as the laptop was my only computing device. The guy told me that they might even be able to do it the same day. Amazing.

Then he opened my computer and saw the French keyboard. “Oh, actually, that’ll take longer, we’ll have to order a French top case, then mount it on the Mac. It will take a few days, a week max.”