This is not a piece of advice in case your new aluminum keyboard breaks, but one you should bear in mind in the eventuality your Mac gets stuck during a Windows (probably not only) installation and you can't get the install disc out anymore.

An Apple Discussions poster makes it as explicit as possible that his old Apple keyboard saved him from immense frustration when he found that his Mac wouldn't spit out an XP installation disc, after an endless cycling through the setup procedure. Here's what the post reads:

"Need some real help here! tried to install Windows XP, gets to final options screen, Agreement page - then keeps cycling through the setup procedure by asking which drive/needs to be formatted/ready to install Windows XP etc. It's just an infinite loop [...] which I can't get out of as each time it restarts the iMac I can't eject the XP Install CD so the whole thing starts again. I tried restarting with Option key held down - no effect, restarting with Eject key pressed - no effect. I have an aluminium keyboard connected and heard somewhere this is not effective with Boot Camp or some such."

The guy was so exasperated by the fact that he couldn't get the disc out and get a regular OS X boot, that he didn't even care whether XP would later run on his Mac or not: "How do I get out of this loop, abandon XP install, and get the thing to start in OS X? Please?"

Luckily, another Discussions user was around to provide with a simple solution - use an old Apple keyboard! Seemingly, the Boot Camp - aluminum issues are true: "Same thing happened to me," he said. "I kept tapping the eject button and the disc came out. And holding down option worked too. Try using a regular keyboard," he advised the upset Mac user and thread starter.

Sure enough, the guy actually had one laying around. And, what do you know - it worked!

"OK - I'm out the other side, with some painful lessons on my back!" the user replied to the poster who offered the simple solution of using an old keyboard. "The aluminium keyboard appears to be another Apple oversight [...] in that the eject button and the Option keys don't work just when you really want them to. Fortunately I kept my old one, plugged it in and it did what even Microsoft keyboards manage to do - work."

Well, we wouldn't go as far as that... So, have any of you had similar (or other) issues with the aluminum keyboard so far?