ewaste: threepeat

It's time for another installment in ewaste. Up this week is our first three-time offender.

PFU of Japan does not make a Bluetooth version of the Happy Hacking keyboard. That's half of the reason that I keep buying new keyboards. The other half is that the keyboard I keep buying is Apple's Wireless Keyboard (available from Amazon).

My first two keyboards died when their three AA batteries exploded. My third keyboard ran low on battery recently. I undid the plug and the first two batteries came out easily but the last one would not budge. I worked with a skewer and put just one battery back in and worked it back and forth violently to try and free the last. Nothing. I beat the keyboard vigorously on the carpet to free the other one to no avail.

Frustrated and impotent, I did what the proletariat do. I made an appointment at the genius bar and brought the offending keyboard, better to mock the employees and petition for a replacement keyboard.

15 seconds into my appointment I was disarmed completely by the genius. The keyboard has only two batteries. The negative battery terminal is not a coiled spring or folded tab. It looks just like a battery.

I now have an out-of-warranty keyboard which I beat savagely into nonfunction.

Apple revised the aluminum wireless keyboard in 2009. It went from a three battery design to a two battery design.

I've owned a lot of devices with tubular magazines over the years. Most were flashlights or shotguns. One was a pretend snake in a novelty peanut brittle tin (Amazon). It took Apple to finally build a device with a magazine that never seems empty! I now suspect that the original iPod stored only 999 songs in my pocket.

Apple uses barely perceptible grey printing directly on the aluminum body of the keyboard to indicate the number and alignment of the batteries. That patent may not have been litigated as part of the recent spat with Samsung but you can be sure it came up at last week's high-level patent gab between Apple's Cook and Google's Page.

Are you a vendor? Are you bringing a new piece of e-waste to market that you would like me to review? Get in touch in the comments section below.