Infotaxis Blog

I am not a Mac user. I have been and will be a PC user - with that said I love mac’s style. Clean, sleek, and simple. For $50 I picked up an Apple keyboard at Best Buy; I am typing on it right now. It has rounded white keys with simple lower-case gray glyphs (except the letter keys, which care upper-case). The rest of the keyboard is a beautiful brushed metal finish.

It has a number of media keys, and (at first glance) all of the typical keys that, as a PC user, I am accustomed to. The “Command” key maps to the “Super” (Linux), or “Windows” (Windows) key on other operating systems, while alt and ctrl are the same. The transposed Super and Alt don’t bother me and were easy to adjust to. There are also some differences from a PC keyboard…

The strangest thing on the keyboard, as a PC user, is the presence of F13 through F19. Obviously these don’t map to PC keys, but will make nice media keys for launching apps, etc. There is also an eject key! There is, interestingly, no numlock (there’s more to this, covered later), scroll lock, etc. The only lock key is the caps lock, which has it’s light right on the key (very elegant! the light is green btw). The “Backspace” key is labeled “Delete”, which just plain makes more sense. The typical spot for the numlock key is taken up by a “Clear” key, which on Linux (and probably Windows) acts as numlock. Finally, there are a few Mac-specific glyphs on F1 through F4 - Brightness Down, Brightness Up, Expose, Widget Layer, respectively. These do no such thing on PC, of course (though we could set this up, if truly desired, with third-party hotkey apps and apps to emulate the functionality).

The experience of the keys is similar to typing on a laptop. They are notoriously hard to type on when your hands are used to the raised keys of a typical desktop keyboard, but I’d wager it won’t take more than a few days before I type as fast, if not faster, than I did on my Saitek Eclipse, which this replaced (that keyboard had many of the gaming letters scratched off at this point, and the controller started to stick and repeat keystrokes)..

There is a bit of a negative side in two areas for this keyboard (at least on Linux). The function keys default to their fn+function key behavior, meaning that you must press fn+F1, for example to get an F1 keypress. Personally I like this, as I rarely use the function keys for their normal purposes. :p

My biggest (and only personal) gripe with this keyboard is the “Clear” key, which acts as numlock (more correctly it’s not a problem with the keyboard, but my Linux distro). When you enter numlock, it puts a keypad on the alphanumeric section, and disables all other keys. Double-tapping F6 disables this, not the clear key. This issue may well be exclusive to Ubuntu-based Linux, however, as it seems to be that the driver maintainers are assuming that the keyboard is one without a built-in numpad, causing the issue.

Overall, I’m loving the keyboard. The $50 was totally justified, and I enjoy the solid, and quite different, feel of the board.

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This entry was posted on Sunday, August 24th, 2008 at 9:52 am and is filed under hardware, hardware review, linux, mac, windows. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site. Your comments will appear immediately, but I reserve the right to delete innapropriate comments.