This keyboard issue is finally fixed with the new ThinkPad T14 Gen 7

ThinkPad keyboards are well known for their comfort, but ever since the Lenovo ThinkPad T14 Gen 3 came out in 2022, European ThinkPad users in particular had a complaint. That specific model brought not only the return to narrower 16:10 screens, but also a new, slightly narrower keyboard layout.

In total, Lenovo reduced the width of their keyboard on 14-inch models from 28.5 cm to 27.5 cm. The extra one cm was gained by shrinking keys at the right edge of the keyboard. On US-ANSI style layouts, the ones with the small enter key, this worked well, as pretty much all keys still had a normal size and only special keys were slightly smaller.

On European-ISO layouts, though, this meant that the four keys to the left of the big Enter key were shrunken down, being only 13 mm wide instead of the standard key-cap size of 16 mm. This hit especially some countries like Germany hard, where frequently used "Umlaut" keys, like "Ü" and "Ä" were shrunken.

After four years and much complaining, it seems Lenovo has finally listened. With the new Lenovo ThinkPad T14 Gen 7, which we recently reviewed, Lenovo changed their European ISO layout. The new model has a less wide Enter key, which means that Lenovo was able to increase the width of two of the formerly shrunken keys could be increased to the standard width - in the case of the German layout we used, the frequently used "Ü" and "Ä" keys are bigger.