My Current Man-Crush: Apple Keyboard
Since I have the occasional man-crush (see Weechat and Weechat on 21″ LCDs), I thought I’d share my latest one.
A little backstory first. My workstation at the office was initially an IBM box, 2 gigabytes of RAM, 2.5GHz or so, single core. It worked fine for a while. Then everyone was upgraded to Core 2 Duo machines, with 4 gigs of RAM, Nvidia video cards…with CentOS 4.5.
Eh.
Now, CentOS is a fine server OS, but for a workstation? And RPMs? We won’t get into that. Plus we had to run XP in VMware, so we could use Outlook. Why not use Outlook Web Access you ask? Apparently the version of Exchange we were running didn’t support reserving resources or rooms when creating appointments from OWA.
Some lucky people got Ubuntu 7.04 or 7.10 instead of CentOS. Still, dual head set up with Nvidia was a bit tricky. And kernel updates would cause VMware to gag, creating headaches for our internal IT department.
So what was the solution?
Everyone got a Mac.
Not just any silly Mac. The new Mac Pros. 8-core. 16 gigs of RAM.
Now you may ask “Nick, why on earth would you need that much horsepower? Rendering video? Some super awesome scientific application?”
No.
I look at Java code all day. Need I say more?
Seriously, between running Eclipse, VMware, and four Tomcat servlet containers, I am very happy to have 16 gigs of RAM.
But the best part about the Mac? The keyboard.
I don’t know how to describe my fascination with it. The aluminum is beautiful. The keys look like cheap plastic, but they are perfectly slick. No need to press hard, making it easy for me to type fast.
Typing on its low profile almost makes it seem like I’m gently drumming my fingers on the desk.
Yeah, the ridiculously priced Optimus Maximus is all the rage today, but the Apple keyboard simplicity reminds me of the old school clickity IBM M keyboards.
After a couple weeks of using the Apple keyboard at work, I decided to get one for my home desktop. It worked pretty well out of the box, except some of the function keys required pressing the Fn button simultaneously.
Of course, the Ubuntu wiki came to the rescue and had a fix.
I have a man-crush on the iPhone and Brad Pitt
Can you suspend your computer to ram when this keyboard is connect? Mine wakes up immediately and I don’t know how to fix it.
@Frank,
Never tried suspending my desktop, so I’m not sure.
Vorian, check your BIOS for your “wake settings”, there’s a wake-on keyboard option usually - and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Apple just ignored standard USB specs and have done something weird.
Our Uni lab switched to iMacs with these Apple keyboards and mice. I hated ‘em and I wasn’t alone. Typing an essay was like as you describe it just bashing the desk. I saw people even bring in their own keyboards as they were fed up of it.
Personal choice though.
You know, most of Apples Hardware is like that. And the Software as well.
The latest Mac Pros… and you only code in Java…
…Are you guys hiring?
Now if only they clicked like those old Model M’s.
I can’t help but completely disagree. We have the same set up in our Physics labs (I do use the Macs when I am working problems on the blackboard). When I sit down and type for more than 20 minutes, my hands start to hurt due to the keyboard. Annoying things that Apple does, leave off function for aesthetics. You ever try using their number lock in a VM (we use Parallel) and having your user account unable to log in? (I speak of the number pad on the right). I’d almost just rather use my old Sun 5 keyboard than that stupid Apple keyboard.