Reviews for Apple Keyboard with numeric keypad - Russian

About 4 months ago I bought a new 24" Silver and black iMac, gorgeous looks, fabulous power, quiet as a graveyard!!

Having been a high end PC user for most of my working life I am a total Apple convert, I briefly had a Dual 1.8 G5 before getting my beloved iMac.

I love the stability and design of these things and when I saw the look of the new keyboard couldn't wait to quite literally get my hands on one.

At the Apple shop in Birmingham UK I decided to go for the wired keyboard because I liked the idea of USB connectors being easily accessible for my nano and for my digital camera, so with a big smile on my face I heaved the huge iMac box home.

There's no doubt about it, the design is beautiful, the colour of green LED on the caps lock key is great, and the touch feels ok BUT ....

I'm sorry to say I much prefer the older 'chunky' keyboard when it comes to doing lots of typing.

I've given this a really good go but too often like others on here have posted I find that the Caps key doesn't lock on if you hit it too quickly, letters are sometimes missed when typing quickly and the overall 'feel' is a bit of a let down.

I'm totally torn now .. I want USB 2 and great looks, but in the end it's the functionality that counts and I know I'm going against what most others have posted on here but my honest opinion is that this keyboard doesn't quite hit the spot, close but not quite!

Personally I think others who have posted on here are getting a bit hyped up because of the looks and the fact that it's new, but really honestly I wish the keys were a little deeper maybe only 3-5mm and that they travelled just a little further so that you knew you had pressed something.

It is definitely quieter than previous keyboards I have used and as I've said it does look fabulous, but when it comes down to it I'm yet to be convinced it is as hard wearing and robust as the older models and it certainly isn't as responsive.

I am going to keep on trying with it to see if my experience improves, but after 4 months I suspect I will still find this falls short of previous offerings, worse still I look at the apple web site and I may be mistaken but it seems like you can't get the old ones anymore, so it may be a trip to e-bay for me I fear...

In closing, I love the iMac and am definitely a bit of an evangelist for Apple nowadays, but this product misses the mark (in my opinion).

I really like the slimline design and the keys are easy to use but...why is there no number (hash, gate) symbol key? Any web-designer/developer MUST use the number (hash)symbol when creating stylesheets and many tools like BBEdit don't provide a way of inserting the symbol as they assume you have the key!

Apparently the wireless model has the same problem - so it looks like I will have to get a 3rd party keyboard!

I'm a bit disappointed. I really liked the chunkiness of the old mac keyboard. Okay, so it won't collect the dirt (or the tea that I spilled all over my old one, hence having to buy a new keyboard) but it's flat like a laptop, and if I'd wanted a laptop I would have bought one. Having said that, it does it's job and that's a good thing!