Dear all,
Does anybody have an experience of buying a laptop from Amazon.de with US keyboard layout (not German)? Do you know whether it is possible and how?

Thanks
Best

I can remember they are sold with a German keyboard by default, unless specified differently.

However: you can also order replacement keyboard on amazon.
Just get both and replace.

Used to be an option on Dell, from their made-to-measure site.

Why not buy it from USA Amazon.com or UK Amazon.co.uk ?

They don't ship to Switzerland (at least not the model I want).

You could go for the cheap option of just changing the keyboard driver and getting some stickers for the keys that are different ("Tastaturaufkleber" - loads available on amazon.de). Though to be honest if you are using it every day you get used to the Swiss layout really quickly and having the differently accented characters easily available is extremely handy if you ever write anything in German.

Thanks. I'm a developer (and beginner in German) so english keyboard will be more convenient in writing code. But not a huge deal as you said and I was preparing to get used to the German keyboard

And those Tastaturaufklebers are really nice. Thanks

I would get an external USB "US Keyboard" and plug her in....

Bye
Z

I'm a developer too and it is great once you become keyboard "multi-lingual" and get used to all these different keyboard layouts! My touch typing has definitely sharpened up as a result of switching.

I'm also a developer (web stuff mainly) and didn't really know any German when I first moved over. I took the plunge with a Swiss German keyboard fairly quickly and never looked back. The learning curve for picking up the new layout is pretty quick and is more than compensated for by having almost every character and bit of punctuation directly under your fingers - it's amazing how much is missing from a US or UK keyboard!

if you can at all touch type, then just remap the keyboard and trust your fingers. Even if you're not that good at it, you'll still learn pretty quickly where the keys are.

In fact, I would prefer to use a Swiss German keyboard mapped to US rather than an actual US keyboard because I don't like the horizontal enter key.

I'm a developer as well. I can touch type on a Swiss and a UK keyboard now. It's not so hard to learn.

If you're going to spend much time here, you might as well get a Swiss German keyboard and get used to it. Not all companies will supply you with a UK keyboard.

I never could get the hang of a French keyboard however.

We looked into this quite a bit when ordering laptops. If you're getting a Mac directly from Apple then you can specify the english keyboard, but the only solutions for getting one from Amazon.de was the sticker option.

With the vestigial return key? I always get the US layout. You can still type whatever characters you need (pound sterling is option-3), but it's a nicer basic layout. This is one of those areas (like mains electricity plugs) where international variation is not helpful, at least for places with a latin (ish) alphabet and arabic numerals.