Everything is Rubbish

So, a little while ago, Apple brought out a couple of new keyboards - one wired, one wireless. The whole web community went a bit nutso, proclaiming them to be the best thing since sliced bread, gorgeous and so very very thin. After a little bit of internal agonising I decided to buy one (this was helped by the fact that whilst I was moving house one of the keys on my then current Apple keyboard got snapped off).

At this point I should probably note that I have a couple of edge case (ish) requirements from my keyboard. You see, I have a Mac Mini. A few months ago, because I was getting a bit sick and tired of the constant beachballing, I decided to buy an external firewire disk to run the OS off since it would be a bit quicker than the painfully slow disk the Mini comes with.  As a consequence, whenever I restart my computer I have to hold down the ‘ALT’ key so that I can choose the FireWire drive as the disk to boot from.  If I don’t, the Mini’s internal disk is used.

This is something I’d been doing very happily using my previous wired Apple keyboard.  Just as you’d expect any keyboard to, it worked as the machine was booting and allowed me to  choose the disk to be booted from.  Not so from the new wired Apple keyboard though.  It steadfastly refuses to allow me to type any characters at all until I reach the login screen.  Yes, I’ve installer the updated keyboard drivers.  Yes, I’ve tested the ‘ALT’ key once the OS is loaded.  No, it will not work at the required time.

So what does this mean to me?  Well, I’ve spent £30 on a new expensive keyboard that doesn’t even work properly.  I still have to have my old half broken keyboard plugged into my Mini so that when I restart my machine I’m able to let it start up properly.

This is a terrible regression for the Apple keyboard.  Like I’ve said, the previous generation of the official wired Apple keyboard works perfectly happily on startup - why doesn’t the new one?