The new Apple wired keyboard 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?
September 15th, 2007 at 2:57 pm
this happened to me as well. just after two days it stopped working altogether.
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September 19th, 2007 at 8:44 pm
Couldn’t you tell it was worse without touching it? It looks an ergonomic nightmare and when I used one in an apple store this was confirmed I couldn’t imagine using one over long periods of time, I’m happy with good old whitey!
As for using a firewire drive as the main OS I’m shocked it made that much of a different the Mini is the worse spec mac you can get (more so if its the intel core solo chip inside)
October 12th, 2007 at 12:04 pm
Can’t you change your startup disk in the prefs to avoid this?
System>prefs>startup disk
October 12th, 2007 at 3:13 pm
@antonio: Sorry to hear that :/
@bilbo: Honestly, I like typing on the keyboard. Running from the FireWire disk does make a sizeable difference for me - I get far less beachballs than I ever did before. As for the Mac Mini being the worst specced of the macs, yes it is but it was the only one I could afford when I bought it.
@ben: Yup, for that usecase I could. That still doesn’t stop it being terrible that the keyboard doesn’t work until the OS has loaded since it stops me from being able to run the machine in target mode or run diagnostics etc without digging out my old keyboard. Thanks for the heads-up though, previously I’d only been aware of doing that via the commandline.
December 16th, 2007 at 3:28 pm
I actually prefer the new keyboard to the old one. And it seems to work fine during boot for me. Perhaps it’s some weird curse with the Mac mini?
May 2nd, 2008 at 1:45 pm
it also happened to
i m not able to change my startup disk while booting (new keyboard and a mac mini core duo)
can somebody help me?
thanks