Recently I was in need for an external keyboard for my home system. I was looking at quite a few keyboards on the market, but the issue was almost all of them were for Windows. Being used to typing on a MacBook Pro I decided to go with the new wired keyboard from Apple.
When opening up the box my first reaction was amazement at how thin it is. I have never seen a keyboard this thin before, at least a thin one that was still good to type on. Another thing that you cant miss is the keyboards sheer beauty. As with most Apple products, the sucker just looks good; but in the world of technology I care more about function than look.
To my astonishment they keyboard is very pleasant to type on. I actually enjoy typing on it more than my old PS2 keyboard that came with a Gateway system back in about ‘98. That keyboard as been connected to my various systems for almost ten years now and it is hard to beat in my opinion. The Apple keyboard kills every other desktop keyboard I have used in the past, including my old board.
The feature I do not like about the keyboard is the function keys. There is no spacing between the keys, like almost all of the Windows based keyboards. It is very difficult to quickly hit F5 on a page to refresh, I am constantly hitting the wrong keys. I am probably in the minority in this matter seeing that I can do nearly anything on a computer with just they keyboard.
Another feature that I miss, which I know I am fairly alone on, is the insert key. When working in the terminal I almost extensively use the insert key to paste text. This is a habit I’ve picked up when switching between SSHing from Windows and Linux; the one thing I could count on is pasting with the insert key. The terminal in OS X is much more forgiving than Putty on Windows, I’ve learned to live without it on my MacBook Pro and I can do the same with this keyboard.
If you run OS X and use an external keyboard do yourself a favor and pick one of these up. They keyboard is truly a joy to use and looks good to boot.
