Revising American keyboards
What I want to know is, why is it so friggin' difficult to type a Spanish n with a ~ sign above it or vowels with accents above them? I am an English-speaking US resident, and even though I don't use it terribly often there are times when I want to insert a Spanish word into an English sentence and find it difficult to do so. Given the growing Hispanic population in the US and the growing phenomenon of Spanish or Spanglish words making their way into American vernacular, there is increasing demand for those symbols.
There are certainly plenty of other symbols that can be eliminated. Honestly, how many people still use the ^ | ` { } symbols on a regular-enough basis for them to deserve valuable piece of permanent real estate on the standard keyboard?
Perhaps American laptops should just come with a "European" key, which when pressed in conjunction with another key produces the European equivalent. so, shift-n produces "N" and euro-n produces "n~"; shift-4 produces "$" and euro-4 produces the Euro currency symbol, euro-e produces an e with an accent, etc. Not perfect, and doesn't help with obscurer European languages like Norwegian, but saves a lot of time when typing French or English words.
By the way, you want to see a really freaky keyboard, try taking a look at an Israeli keyboard. That keyboard is jam packed because it has to have both English and Hebrew alphabets, not to mention Hebrew is right-to-left so everything is back-asswards. Even the Start key (and Start menu) is on the right instead of the left.