Logitech solar-powered wireless Mac keyboard loves the sun, shuns Bluetooth

Apple needs to make one of these with a Magic Trackpad instead of a number pad, but with the ability to switch sides. (I need my trackpad on the left)

Or at least lower the price of the two individual products and release a cheaper tray for them.

The fact that it doesn't use bluetooth is awesome. I don't know why they get so much adoration among the mac people for bluetooth mice and keyboards.

I guess all of you like that your keyboard and mouse take a second or two to wake up from the power saving sleep mode that they have to go into not to drain their little AA's in 2 days. I guess you like having the cursor feel like you are towing it around in a bowl full of syrup with a rubber band. I guess none of you ever run into that problem where the apple keyboard or mouse loses its pairing and has to be taken through a 10 minute hell of remembering the morese-code button mashing sequence to reset the thing until you just give up and have to go and beg someone to borrow their super lame USB Dell keyboard so you can make your shiny mac work.

Look, it's really nice to have bluetooth peripherals available for those situations where it makes sense -- iOS devices, laptops with only one or two usb ports, etc. But why someone would voluntarily subject themselves to this on a desktop computer is beyond my ability to understand. The little micro-mini logitech dongles just work flawlessly -- end of story. Forget their software. Unobtrusive, excellent range, no setup, ridiculously small power consumption; what else do you really want?

Is it aluminum or plastic?

It isn't bluetooth because bluetooth would be too power hungry to survive off solar.

I'm guessing the dongle takes as much power to run as the keyboard saves from the solar cells.

If the keyboard had BT, I would recommend it to some of my Mac friends who want alternatives to Apple's wireless keyboards (mainly because they need a numeric keypad). But the lack of BlueTooth here is unforgivable. All Macs come with BT built in, why would anyone want to bother with a dongle?

I would buy this but check out the price difference in the U.K. $59.99 in the U.S. and £69.99 (thats a $115) in the U.K. I am sorry but that is just taking the urine. I hope you are reading this Logitech UK because I am a big buyer of your stuff, remotes and squeezeboxes but if you think I am going to pay 100% more than the U.S then you have another thing coming

What the hell you guys are talking about ? Haven't you ever used Logitech's Unifying dongle ?

First, it IS working out-of-box, WITHOUT any software installed. That dongle does nothing but mimics a wire-replacement of USB. IT DOES NOT NEED ANY DRIVER. Logitech's driver is for the input devices, not for the dongle. And these drivers provide nothing but binding the 4th/5th/6th/whatever mouse button to special function. You can still bind these functions to system shortcuts like mission control without any software installed. I'm using Logitech Revolution for years, and have never installed any driver.

Second, the Unify dongle is really, really, really tiny. The oversize is about 0.6 inch * 0.4 inch, INCLUDING the USB metal junction part. When you plug it into the machine, it's almost flat in the surface. And you only need one dongle for both keyboard and mouse.

Third, the wireless keyboard and mouse consume much, much, much less power than Bluetooth devices. With same rechargeable battery, such device may have up to three times of life time comparing to Bluetooth devices.

Not bad, but the lack of BT is appalling. I use rechargeable batteries and have enough so that I'm rarely stuck, esp. since Apple's wireless keyboards are so frugal.

Solar aspect of the keyboard is just a gimmick, 2 alkaline AAs in Apple BT keyboard last very long, maybe the entire useful life of the keyboard itself. There is no real impact to environment of disposable battery vs additional solar panel + rechargeable battery inside Logitech keyboard.