Apple hates quality

I own a DAS Ultimate S keyboard, and am very happy with it. Yes, the price tag is pretty high, especially when compared to those cheap keyboards you'll find in every bakery shop these days; but the difference in quality isn't something to be ignored.

A while back, I got three PowerMac G4 machines from someone, so I could work on them for Debian. They'd been gathering dust for a while, since I'd been busy with other things, but this week I had a look at them.

One of the three was incomplete; it lacked a video card. The other two, however, were quite usable. They came with MacOS 10.4.something, and one of them had a 40GB hard disk, while the other had an 80GB one. The disks were quite noisy, but I've already replaced them with a CF-IDE adapter, so now they're running off some solid-state storage, which should be at least somewhat faster, if not entirely efficient.

However, installing a quality operating system on them proved to be somewhat harder than expected.

When I connect the DAS keyboard to the PowerMac, put the Debian CD in the drive, and reboot the machine, it will eject the CD rather than trying to boot off of it.

When I disconnect the keyboard, it will boot off the CD fine, but since OpenFirmware apparently doesn't support USB hotplugging, that means yaboot will sit there forever waiting for me to enter "install" and hit enter.

When I replace the high-quality, 130-euro DAS keyboard with a cheap crappy "I don't know what a proper ISO layout looks like" 5-euro Logitech "keyboard", suddenly everything works as it should.

Except that my hands hurt from trying to type on that thing, of course.

I swear, Apple hates quality.