Wireless Keyboard and Mouse acting badly... feels like a ripoff

[Sean Dempsey]

So, I ordered the apple keyboard and mouse, bluetooh wireless, with my Mac Pro.

I put in the batteries, mate them with my machine, all is well.

Well, after a few hours, the mouse is just WAY to herky-jerky for design work. If I try to move it across the screen in a straight line, I can see it stop and start and jerk around. So, I turn it off and use my Intellipoint Mouse I've had for years, and it works great. Okay, chalk that up to needing a faster communicating mouse for designing. No biggie.

But now (less than 36 hours from opening the box) the Keyboard is starting to suck too! It disconnects every hour or so, sometimes more frequent. I wait for a few seconds, hit some keys, and it comes back on, but I still get the icon on my screen that says the keyboard is not communicating. Well. I figure that was sleep mode, and it's saving my battery, I can live with that.


But just in the last hour or so, it's starting "sticking" on keys, not in the hardware, but the software. I was backspacing over some code in a work file, and suddenly the backspace key just kept going and going and going, until it eventually stopped. I was able to just hit apple-Z and undo, but it was really obnoxious, and potentially dangerous when working with work files and command lines and FTP...

So even as I post this, I keep on getting ssssssssssssstuff liiiiiiiikkkkkke this.

I love the look of the apple wireless periphs, but if they are this crappy after 1 day, I might have to just opt for wired stuff. I feel bad I paid extra for them, but this isn't acceptable.

Anyone else experienced this or know what to do? The batteries are totally fresh and full, and my Mac Pro is only about 3 feet away from the devices.

 

[rogersmj]

That's exceptionally odd. I've owned wireless input devices for about 6 years, pretty much when the first ones appeared. No keyboard has been more reliable for me than the Apple bluetooth one. If you bought them recently, I'd call Apple and see what they can do for you.

 

[sinecurea]

Firstly,
Apple's wireless keyboard and mouse are a ripoff, like most Apple things. But I like you, tend to buy them.
I use a KVM with my Mac Mini in work, and I can't work with it at all, so just to rule it out - you're pluging the keyboard and mouse straight into a Mac machine, aye?

 

[rogersmj]

you're pluging the keyboard and mouse straight into a Mac machine, aye?

Huh? He's asking about the bluetooth keyboard and mouse. They wouldn't be plugged into anything.

 

[Sean Dempsey]

Well, I'll just give apple a call, if there's nothing like a driver or firmware update out there. I didn't know if this was normal or not, it just seemed odd that a product supposedly as "refined" as this would have such frequent problems, during it's first day of use.

Maybe I got a lemon.

 

[Sean Dempsey]

update:

talked to apple tech support, they say that this is a known issue with the keyboard and mouse, and they are sending a technician to my house to replace the bluetooth antenna, and then maybe replace the keyboard and mouse with a wired unit.

So, we'll see.

 

[Sean Dempsey]

Technician arrived! Only took 2 weeks to get here.

Bluetooth module was replaced, am working on testing it out now to see if I can replicate my problems before with losing connection and repeating key entries (looked like thiiiiiiiiiiis).

We'll see. It was a 3rd party contractor out of Vegas, really nice guy. The bluetooth module for the Mac Pro is tiny.