Apple Keyboards, Filco Keyboards and USB Hubs
When my keyboard died, a few years ago, from a glass of wine spilled on it, I decided that it was time to get a nice feeling board that would let me type fast and accurately. At that stage, my main computer was a PC I had built myself from parts bought in Akihabara. I had already heard about the Tactile Pro at that stage, but as much as I looked, I couldn’t find any for sale. I found similar keyboards, like the Atessa Crystal Pro and Crystal White, but the price was far too high at 12,000 yen. They had a Japanese key layout, which has a nice big return key, and at the time I thought that was a good enough feature to forgive the other funky layout issues of Japanese keyboards. I’ve changed my mind about that, although I still wish I had a bigger return key every time I punch in a backslash at the end of a sentence.
Instead of getting the Atessa (which later went out of production, just when I was ready to lay down the cash for one), I bought an Apple Keyboard. The official keyboard was recently updated with the flat style keyboard, the one I bought was the bottom image of this page. I loved it for about 3 months, after which the keys started to stick and it got harder and harder to type on. The keys that stuck the most were the ones I used most often, like the left control key and left flower key. I learned that although Apple were pretty good at making other products, they let everyone down with their keyboards. Short of cash, and partly waiting for the new Tactile Pro 2 to hit the stores, I persisted with my sticky control keys and constant typos.
When the Tactile Pro 2 came out, it was even more expensive than the Atessa, about 19,000 yen total. A crazy price, for that much I could get 20 ordinary keyboards. What really put the nail in the coffin was the way Matis set up the USB hub, so that you had to plug in 2 cables just to use a keyboard. I searched the internet for a shop in Akihabara, found a dedicated keyboard shop on google and went down there. I came out after a lot of clacking with a Filco Majestouch with Cherry switches. I was originally looking for a keyboard with Alps keyswitches, like the Tactile pro, but the only boards that had Alps were the ones with a Japanese layout. Most Japanese layout keyboards have extra keys at the sides of the space key to do Kanji conversion. This makes the space key smaller and it’s easy to hit these keys by accident. Also, the @ key is in a different place and the keys around the return key are swapped around a fair bit. I’m used to the American layout now, so it was too much of a big change to make.
Compared to Alps keyswitches, Cherry switches don’t make as much noise. They feel much ‘flatter’ as well and have a kind of smooth sound. I’m not sure which is better, but I know that anything is better than the membrane keys of the old Apple Keyboard. And compared to the new Apple Keyboard, these keys give a lot more feedback about when the key has actually been pressed. They sink evenly when you press them and my rate of typos has gone down since I started using them. The major problem with the Filco keyboard is that it doesn’t have any USB ports. The old Apple Keyboard got this right, with 2 ports on the back, one for a mouse and one for some other USB junk. So for the longest time I had my new keyboard and my old mouse plugged into my old Apple Keyboard, which was plugged into my computer. That meant I could save on buying a USB hub, but also meant that I had a big useless keyboard perched precariously on top of my desk. Recently, I decided to take action and extract the USB hub part of the keyboard and just junk the rest. I even made a YouTube video of the process.
I’ll admit that what I ended up with is almost as big as the keyboard, but at least it’s prettier, and I can put stuff on top of it without it typing ‘rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr’.
To turn the Apple Keyboard into a USB hub, I used the smallest Torx screwdriver I had to take out the three Torx screws at the bottom of the keyboard. Next, I separated the ribbons connecting the keys to the little circuit board. I unscrewed the circuit board from the base (4 philips cross screws). The next part was the most radical. I didn’t realise it, but I had to break the base of the keyboard to get the wire out. The only other option would have been soldering it back together after cutting the wires. I just broke it over my knee, it went fairly easily. I had planned to put the USB board into a nice small box, but it turned out to be bigger than expected, so I put it in a nice big box instead. Someday I’ll find a nice long box to put it in.
I can really recommend the Majestouch, I’ve even ordered one to use in work. They have a new one out, a Bluetooth Wireless version of the one I bought. It even fixes the problem of slippy feet which mine has (I fixed the problem by adding LRF and rubber glove finger tips).
The other problem I had with my keyboard was the windows setup, where the Apple key is mapped to the Windows key, and in the wrong position. I fixed this with the fantastic Double Command.
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