Adjusting screen brightness with the “crumb-catcher” keyboard

This can be filed under “Things that everybody probably already knows but you only just discovered recently”.

Both my old Powermac and my current Mac Pro shipped with the white “crumb catcher” keyboards. While the keyboards on Apple’s laptops as well as the newer aluminum keyboards have buttons for brightness, I always thought that you could not do so on the white keyboards. They have dedicated volume and eject buttons so I assumed that any brightness controls would be labeled as such. To adjust the brightness on my ACDs, I just used the buttons on the side of the screen itself. Not ideal as I prefer to not have to leave the keyboard when possible.

Thar be brightness controls on those keys!

Imagine my surprise when I overshot the “Home” key and hit F15. The screen brightness overlay appeared and the brightness went up by a notch. Sure enough, its neighbor to the left, F14, decreased the brightness. Now, while I’m happy that I can now adjust the brightness from the keyboard, I have to say I’m puzzled as to why Apple didn’t stick the brightness icons on the keys. I don’t know about you, but I couldn’t give a rat’s ass about having F14 and F15 keys. The fact that I only discovered this now shows how often I press them. But, stick those “sun” icons on there and all of a sudden, those keys are useful. Of course, that leaves F16 out there all alone though I’m sure they could have figured out something for it as well. Now, the newer keyboards extend the function keys all the way over and all the hardware functions are doing double-duty with them. God knows my computing experience has been seriously blunted by the lack of an F19 key.

I get the feeling many of you know about this already and that I’m late to the party. If so, my apologies. But if this is news to you, then you might want to consider breaking out that sharpie and re-labeling your F14 and F15 keys.