I guess this might be pretty obvious to long time mac users, but it’s a recent realization of mine, so I’ll write it down in case anyone chances upon it.
On a Powerbook (as well as MacBooks and MacBook Pro’s), the F-keys double as functional keys that control hardware features like brightness, volume, and keyboard state. Coming from the windows world, I found it odd that by default, these keys were always set to perform these hardware functions, and getting an actual F# key required holding down the separate ‘fn’ key.
Well after many months of use, I realized why this was the default. Unlike the Windows world, hardly any Mac applications map the F-keys to anything. So they pretty much go unused. In such a situation, it makes sense to just always map them to hardware control features.
The only noteable exception is the two exposé keys (F9 and F10), but I mean, who uses exposé? It’s something to show your friends, but I don’t find it that useful. Command-Tab’ing is usually much faster.