I own an Apple iMac, a most sexy computing machine, which came with a most sexy input device: a bluetooth keyboard. I happily used this wireless keyboard for most of the year and half I have owned this particular iMac. The keyboard is impossibly small, lightweight, and spectacularly easy to use. The latter point was most surprising to me as the first two were readily evident, but I thought that having something so small and compact would make it harder to type on. Quite the opposite, in fact. While I grew up on massive beige PC desktop computers with their massive beige PC keyboards, for the past few years I had been using either an iBook or a Macbook laptop, and Apple has been making their laptop keyboards smaller and more compact in the endless pursuit of the perfect portable computing machine. The end result was that I was becoming more and more accustomed, without realizing it, to a smaller keyboard. In actual fact, the Apple aluminium wireless keyboard is really about the same size as a Macbook keyboard. Therefore, when I received one with my new iMac, typing with it was as natural as ever.
A few months ago, however, I had become somewhat nostalgic for a full size keyboard, that is, one that contained a numeric keypad and larger arrow keys. I had a full size Apple keyboard lying around, and when I say full size, I mean full. I had picked up an old iMac keyboard on eBay a few years back as a backup in case all my batteries went dead, or I spilled something, or for whatever reason I needed a keyboard that would plug in and work. But the massive input device was easily three or four times the size of the sleek bluetooth model and more than usually clunky.
All this talk of size, and sexiness, aside, the worst problem that I had with the old keyboard was that the keys were so large, and so spread out, that I continually hit the wrong key. A long time ago when I was just a young lad and Windows 95 was brand new, I typed in much the same way that a woodpecker pecks: tap – tap- tap (except that woodpeckers are usually faster). I hunted endlessly for the right key and then punched it down with a determined finger. Eventually, though, I took a short typing class in school, wherein I learned “correct” procedure, and straightaway I began typing faster with much fewer mistakes. Now, of course, like most people my age, typing is second nature. I never really look at the keyboard anymore, my fingers just fly across it and I magically hit the exact key that I intend to type almost every time. Sometimes I still find this amazing, given the number of keys on the keyboard and their completely unalphabetical layout. (I mean, who was this QWERTY person anyway?)
So given the fact that spend most of my time on the computer typing away, writing one sort of thing or another, the ability to type quickly and accurately is a necessity, and the large old keyboard simply couldn’t help me. The other problem I had was that I am mostly an insomniac and my writing is largely a nocturnal activity. I tend to only use the minimum amount of electricity, and so didn’t bathe in an overabundance of light. The aluminium keyboard, with its white keys and silvery reflective body, never gave me cause to have a problem. The iMac screen emitted enough light to see by for those few occasions when I actually needed to look at the keyboard; however, the older keyboard had black keys, and seeing as how I frequently missed the one I meant to hit while typing, I couldn’t even see the keys to find the correct one. I was reduced to using a USB lamp plugged into the convenient USB port on the left end of the keyboard just to make sure I was typing accurately.
Sure, most of these problems were the result of poor lighting and a dark keyboard, no doubt solved with proper illumination and a whiter keyboard, but the fact is, as soon as I retrieved my wireless keyboard and set it back up, I was typing much quicker and more accurately from the get go. There quite simply isn’t any comparison between the old and the new.
Now, if only there were a way to have my numeric keypad as well.
Turns out: there is. 
I have since sold my wireless keyboard and purchased the Apple aluminium wired keyboard with numeric keypad. Much slimmer and sexier than ye olde keyboard, and the keys are compact like the wireless version. I love it so very much!
a simple man 