my opinion on Apple Wireless keyboard

ivelegacy

12 Feb 2019, 23:32

yesterday it happened I tried an Apple Wireless Keyboard because a colleague bought it for his iMac (he was using a wired USB keyboard before the purchase), and personally, I think it's a bad product
  • they quality of keys is very low
  • the arrow keys were defective, even if the keyboard was brand new, the up and down arrows were not working, and it took two hours to understand the problem was not software, not a driver, but rather hardware, then sorted out by removing and reinserting the two key caps.
  • the Bluetooth is terrible, the keyboard didn't work with Windows 10 at the first try, neither it worked with macOSX Lion ...
  • typing on the keyboard is stressing

Findecanor

13 Feb 2019, 03:13

I suppose that you must mean the latest compact Apple Aluminium Keyboard and not the A1016 from 2003 or the more recent "Apple Magic Keyboard".

By the way, Apple has made specific Windows drivers for it. I'm not sure if the Fn key works without it.

ivelegacy

13 Feb 2019, 14:10

Image

on the box, it's written: MC184LB Apple Wireless Keyboard

ivelegacy

13 Feb 2019, 14:23

Findecanor wrote:
13 Feb 2019, 03:13
By the way, Apple has made specific Windows drivers for it. I'm not sure if the Fn key works without it.
Windows XP found a Bluetooth device and asked for completing the PIN verification (please type these 5 numbers on the keyboard and press enter).

The arrow keys were not working, until they got removed, and reinstalled.

Windows10 wend mad with the keyboard ... it found the device, but then it randomly fails the PIN verification.

The keyboard was firmware 0.8: do you wanna update the firmware? OH, you have to download a DMG, but this does neither work on Windows10 nor on MacOSX Lion ... you need a recent MacOSX :roll:

----

Updated the firmware to something newer, thanks to a second colleague who kindly offered his help: now Windows10 works better with the PIN verification, but, and this is really irritating, randomly some key is not always recognized when you press it so typing on the keyboard is really stressing.

I am happy it was not my purchase :D

squizzler

13 Feb 2019, 15:19

I't's sad to hear that Apple is slipping in the quality department. I have found the older (2007 according to underside) wired keyboard to do quite well, at the time I thought it a classy product (yes you may laugh) and it worked fine for about seven years, including grubby workshop environment which eventually did for it.

Perhaps this thread needs moving to the review section, as it might be useful resource for those considering similar.

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Muirium
µ

13 Feb 2019, 15:29

The aluminium keyboards are pretty passable in my experience. No feel worth a damn, of course, but they’re unpresuming and do as they’re told. The Bluetooth on my A1314, which I bought new about a decade ago, is completely solid, across many devices of mine, all the way back to my 2003 PowerBook! It is what it is. Not bad, by Apple standards.

The “Magic” models, meanwhile, apparently flex, which is not reassuring. Better feel than the MacBooks but that bar is quite some limbo…

ivelegacy

13 Feb 2019, 16:02

squizzler wrote:
13 Feb 2019, 15:19
I't's sad to hear that Apple is slipping in the quality department
Well, let's also talk about laptops. My brother bought a maxed-out full spec MacBook/Pro in 2015. He used it with care, but since he is a mechanical engineer, he needed to run a couple of programs for calculating FEM.

FEM is heavy computing load that makes both the CPU and GPU stressed, as well as the ram and the hard drive, we know it, but for a 2500 euro laptop claimed to be "top gun" you won't for sure expect a shitty cooling system under the hood.

But, unfortunately, the MacBook/Pro was unable to make itself cooled enough, and the laptop ended for being damaged. Suddenly, during a FEM computation, it went out of work. My brother spent 4 weeks at the Apple Customer Center waiting for the machine repaired, which was even more irritating since we needed it for his job.

Once repaired (600 euro for this, they replaced the whole motherboard), it worked for 3 weeks, and then again it crashed with the GPU completely dead, so brother decided to buy an HP laptop.

ivelegacy

13 Feb 2019, 16:23

Muirium wrote:
13 Feb 2019, 15:29
bought new about a decade ago, is completely solid
I bought a PowerMac-G4 in 2004, a second-hand machine used during a show-room, so a bit scratched and damaged on the plastic, but I don't care about this. I used MacOSX 10.4 for a couple of years, then I loadedGentoo/Linux, configuring the computer as a server, so the console has been forced to the serial line(1), and the graphics adapter is removed.
# uname -r
4.16.0-Fearless-Coyote-mdd-2xG4
Since 2006 there is no keyboard either any VGA LCD attached, the machine is remotely accessed on the ethernet and randomly accessed on the serial line, but the plastic wired USB keyboard the computer was sold with, has been used it on other computers for more than a decade without any problem.

In 2008 I bought a second-hand PowerBook G3 laptop since it was super cheap on eBay (70 Euro) and I was a student with the need for his thesis written in a decent way.

Yet again, loaded with Gentoo/Linux for being used with a lot of toolchains, LaTex, and Octave. The last one is an opensource Matlab clone that made the computer stressed for heavy computations, but the PPC750@400Mhz didn't suffer any problem, neither the machine (and note, it was a second-hand unit) died for this.

So ... as far as I can infer by my experiences, both the computers and the keyboard are made in a superior quality vs modern products


(1) you need to hack the OpenBook firmware by a script that redirects the console to the "modem" line. This is a true serial TTL line so you need to adapt it for the RS232.voltage levels.

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matt3o
-[°_°]-

13 Feb 2019, 16:32

ivelegacy wrote:
13 Feb 2019, 16:02
FEM is heavy computing load that makes both the CPU and GPU stressed, as well as the ram and the hard drive, we know it, but for a 2500 euro laptop claimed to be "top gun" you won't for sure expect a shitty cooling system under the hood.
unfortunately it's a problem with many new apple PCs. the new macmini has the same issue. same story for the "top of the line" macbook pro. But you know, apples are for instagram and google docs only apparently.

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TheInverseKey

13 Feb 2019, 16:51

matt3o wrote:
13 Feb 2019, 16:32
ivelegacy wrote:
13 Feb 2019, 16:02
FEM is heavy computing load that makes both the CPU and GPU stressed, as well as the ram and the hard drive, we know it, but for a 2500 euro laptop claimed to be "top gun" you won't for sure expect a shitty cooling system under the hood.
unfortunately it's a problem with many new apple PCs. the new macmini has the same issue. same story for the "top of the line" macbook pro. But you know, apples are for instagram and google docs only apparently.
You mean you can use a laptop for more than just social media and a browser? /s

ivelegacy

13 Feb 2019, 19:15

eh, for serious high computing tasks, here my laptop is only used as portable X11 and vt220 terminal to a remote machine that thereby can be a Xeon big iron machine with a lot of computing power, CPU, ram, disks, etc etc, and with the proper cooling system, while the laptop just needs to properly export the interface, which is usually a low-intensity activity, except for a shitty browser like Firefox that even when remotely launched always tries to generate too many traffic, and this is very bad for every x11 client; therefore as browsers, I am using Dillo, and Midori, and usually on a VNC connection, while I use RDP for remotely compute FEM and Ansys stuff executed on a Windows (virtual) machine.

andrewjoy

14 Feb 2019, 12:22

I don't care what its being used for i would expect my 2000 USD machine to not throttle when a 400 USD laptop works fine .

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matt3o
-[°_°]-

14 Feb 2019, 13:02

This is related

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stratokaster

14 Feb 2019, 14:40

Maybe I missed something, but when did the definition of throttling changed from "cannot maintain its nominal frequency" to "does not maintain all-core turbo all the time?"

I'm not defending Apple, but I also see this complaint in r/thinkpad all the time, and it's completely ridiculous. Modern Intel CPUs are not supposed to maintain their all-core turbo frequencies for hours, at least not within their specified thermal envelope. You can easily verify this by downloading Intel Power Gadget and monitoring CPU power consumption. i5-8500B, which is a 65W CPU, easily hits 100W+ when running all-core turbo. The turbo frequencies are designed for quick bursts of activity and then the CPU will, and should, scale back to its nominal frequency.

By the way, my Mac mini, which happens to have the aforementioned i5-8500B, has no trouble maintaining all-core frequency of 3.5 GHz, which is 0.5 GHz above its base clock and just 0.1 GHz lower than its max all-core turbo speed, which means that it is NOT throttling despite what YouTube "experts" say. But I'm located in Ireland which is famous for its toasty 12-degree weather, so maybe people in shittier climates have it worse.

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matt3o
-[°_°]-

14 Feb 2019, 14:50

the point is that comparable cheaper products by other brands don't have that problem. I have seen a similar comparison between the top macbook pro and an asus ultrabook. Now I'm sure it's not a problem of just Apple (you mentioned thinkpad) but hell, when an Asus does better engineering than apple it's bad

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