Mac Format

A missing key in virtual macOS

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British and US English are so different they require separate keyboards: ISO in the UK, and ANSI in the US. They’re easy to distinguis­h as the ISO version, used in Europe and much of the rest of the world, has different left Shift and Return keys. Count the keys, though, and there’s a more ‘sinister’ difference, as the ISO keyboard has an extra key at the left of the numbers.

Apple supplies ISO keyboards and layouts for many languages, but macOS virtualisa­tion for Apple silicon Macs is an exception as it only supports ANSI. In practice, the difference you’ll notice is that missing key: in ISO English layouts, it won’t cause a problem, as that provides § and ± symbols. But in French, the ANSI layout loses @ and #, which are commonplac­e in computing, and make a virtual machine almost unusable.

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