TUAW Hands On with the Apple Keyboard

Yesterday I took a little trip down to my local Apple Store (the Michigan Ave. store here in Chicago) to check out the Keyboard. That's what Apple is calling their latest engineering marvel– not the iBoard or the MacBoard, just Keyboard. I got a chance to check out the new iMac, and play with the new iLife apps for a bit, then I cracked open TextEdit and started typing.

So what did I think? I wasn't kidding when I called it an engineering marvel– the Keyboard is unlike any other keyboard I've seen. It is extremely, almost dangerously thin– Apple is already making stuff the width of cardboard, and pretty soon they'll move on to paper-thin. It's not actually flexible, but I got the feeling that if I really tried (or just landed a heavy phonebook on it), I could break it in two. Probably not true, but I still felt that way.

But you don't buy a keyboard for its durability– you buy it to type on, and that's where I ran into problems.

The keyboard does feel very similar to the new MacBook keyboards– each key only drops a tiny bit, making for small, quick movements. The keytops are completely flat, or at least so much so that I couldn't feel any grooves or contouring. So if you like the MacBook keyboard, you'll probably like this one. I, however, am in the Model M crowd– I like my keys big, deep, and clicky. I like to feel like I'm actually punching out words when I'm, well, punching out words, and so I like a keyboard that has a little heft to it, a keyboard that can chop a melon in half.

Actually, the Keyboard is probably thin enough to do a little fruit chopping, but in terms of really feeling it, I couldn't. I'm sure if I had more time with it, I'd get more used to it. And I was extremely impressed with the way the keyboard itself was built– just like the iPhone (which I spent way too much time playing with in the store yesterday... again), it's a slim, well-designed, very functional*, beautiful, amazing thing.

It's just not my thing. If I got one with an iMac, I'd probably use it and learn to love it. But using it for the 20 minutes or so I did yesterday didn't convince me to replace the keyboard I've got now. It's a great keyboard, it's just too darn thin for me.

Have you guys bought or used it yet? What did you think?

*The only other problem I had with it was that, even in the Apple Store, the dedicated keys didn't do what they were supposed to– an employee told me to go into settings and change all the hotkeys, which is obviously not what should have happened. But I believe that exact problem got fixed this morning, so it's probably not a concern any more.