[jrockway]

If you're trained to touch-type on cherry or topre keyswitches, you're not going to be able to use a non-mechanical keyboard. The muscle action is just different; you're using your muscles to slow your fingers at the bottom of each keystroke rather than applying the energy all at once to your desk. This honestly doesn't make much difference to me, but I know many people who are more sensitive that do notice the difference. To each, his own.

(Analogy: punch the wall as hard as you possibly can. Then do the same action, but slow your fist down as quickly as possible so that it doesn't hit the wall. That's the difference between membrane keyboards and Cherry/Topre/IBM keyboards.)

[swombat]

But the Apple keyboards are mechanical - just with less give. The analogy is more that in one case, you have to punch a heavy hanging weight and get it to hit the wall, whereas in the next case, you can just quickly flick it with your finger to achieve the same effect.

I'm "trained to touch-type" on old keyboards, since I learned to touch-type when I was a teenager playing MUDs and there were none of these newfangled Apple keyboards. And yet, I made the transition without even thinking about it. It's not an iPad keyboard, it's a real keyboard with real keys in all the right places, and you don't have to smash it quite so hard, but it's still "mechanical"...