apple have broken basic typing

I got a MacBook Air because a friend said it had good battery life, and something about "silicon", whatever that is.  I also have this idea that laptops should go to sleep and wake up properly, which no pc laptops have ever done.

The battery does indeed last a week unplugged, with some use every day, which is nice.  On the other hand, my TV remote battery used to last 8 years.  The difference is that the TV remote worked.

Almost everything I have tried typing into the macbook has been erroneously changed, or "corrected".  This included a specific piece of information, something like a username, that I kept entering correctly, and EVERY TIME, the apple computer would change it, to the same incorrect string.  I couldn't work out how to make it stop.  Sometimes I just gave up and accepted the wrongified text.

There is something profoundly disappointing about typing on a computer not working.  It's a bit like a boat that doesn't float.

Back in the days of windows, spinning swap spaces, and low memories, the commonest way for typing to not work was big delays due to computer busy.  Instead of being fast-tracked from irq to a preliminary drawing of character at cursor, its processing went into whatever queue, and eventually it got processed.

The modern way to break typing is for web sites to install their own keyboard-listener-event-loops, and mess it up, dropping keystrokes from fast typers and whatnot. 

There's also the issue that keyboards don't know what they are or what their buttons are about.  Instead, they send scancodes, which are a bit like x-y coordinates, and these have to be interpreted according to externally-supplied configuration about layout.  That's why every installer asks about keyboard layout.  Why no one has just made a keyboard that (has a mode that) just sends characters instead of scancodes, I don't know.  Or could it have something, perhaps tacked onto HID/USB, "this was my factory layout"?  Apparently not.

Once configured, the layout won't stick, because software is not layered correctly.  You might have configured it for the console on linux, but X won't know.  X is looking at scancodes also, and you have to configure it again there.  Then you install a VM GUI, and .. it doesn't inherit X's ones, it's looking at your raw scancodes again.