Quick Q re: Wireless Keyboard

[KettyKrueger]

I'm thinking of shelling out for one of these bad boys. I do one concern though, does it connect quick enough (to bluetooth) to able to, for example; hold option on boot up?

Basically, will I need to key my wired keyboard around for certain boot-up tasks?

Many thanks.

 

[Mr. Giver '94]

It will connect right at startup.

You can actually leave the KB on and it will just go into 'standby' mode until the computer is turned on again. Mine connects right as I wake my iMac up from sleep (sleep turns off bluetooth too) so I can log in etc. The standby for the KB uses little to no battery btw.

If you do turn off the keyboard it should connect quickly enough to boot in the ways you're talking about.

 

[mactoids]

I agree, the Apple wireless keyboard does connect fast and the battery life is acceptable. There was a time when I also used a wireless mouse - but unlike the keyboard, the mouse seemed to be a glutton for batteries.

 

[mkrishnan]

Actually, I think it's not so much that the keyboard connects quickly that Apple created a special system for pairing its Bluetooth keyboards at firmware boot -- I think it actually then re-connects via the actual normal BT stack later in the booting process. Because it's not just a matter of quick -- you can not only do things like hold option at boot, but you can boot into Open Firmware (e.g. on the PPC's) and edit things using the wireless keyboard without OS X even running at all, something that is not generally true for BT keyboards on Windows PCs.

Whichever way, though, they do an extremely nice job with it.

On my iMac, I have never, ever needed to plug a wired kb or mouse into it to be able to get it to do anything. In contrast I have had to disaster recovery on my EeeBox in WinXP with a wired keyboard because I couldn't do low level stuff with the BT keyboard it normally uses.

Very nice -- one of those little things I think Apple implemented extremely well.