14 DAY TRIAL // Apple's new keyboard has caught the attention of many, with its sleek look and tactile feel. Many who own MacBooks and loved this type of keyboard on their portable have purchased one for their desktop machines, but this one keyboard seems to be stirring up problems.
Last week there were protests about Apple's decision to no longer have the Apple logo on the Command key, which was initially known as the Open Apple key. While this is simply a mater of taste, as the functionality of the keyboard remains unaltered, other objective issues have started surfacing. It looks like there is a problem with the keyboard and two keys, namely F3 and F4 which double as the Expos? key and the Dashboard key respectively. Many users are reporting that they keys don't work, and this issue persists across machines and system installations.
Although the keys appear not to work, it is not a hardware issue with the keyboard as assigning some other shortcut to those keys will work fine. So the only explanation is software related. Interestingly enough, what can be gathered from initial reports is that only people with older hardware are experiencing the problem, while users with the new iMacs report that their keyboards are working perfectly. The problem is quite widespread, some users are even reporting that they went to their local Apple Stores and tested the keyboards there only to find the same unresponsive keys.
Considering that the keys do function, the fault must be somewhere in the software, but it is very strange that Apple did not catch on to this considering how widespread the problem is. Until Apple releases a patch to solve this issue, the only thing users can do is use those keys for some other purpose, as well as seek alternate means of invoking Dashboard and Expos?.