Vocino Labs

Today I purchased a wired Apple Keyboard for my home office at my local Apple Store.

The keyboard is great and the anodized aluminum goes very well with the dark wood of my office, however that’s not what this post is about.

When I plugged in the keyboard, initially the ancillary functions didn’t work. So I figured I must have glanced over an installation CD during the passionate excitement of opening the box.

Upon checking the CD-sized plastic wrap, no installable data could be found though. So I did what I’ve never done before; I opened the manual.

Setting Up Your Keyboard

On the very first page, we see the set up instructions. And what does the first line of “Setting Up Your Keyboard” say? Simple, “Choose Apple (CMD) > Software Update from the menu bar.”

Duh. I was so wrapped up in assuming things should be shipped in some retarded convoluted way, I forgot that perhaps if I just do what I think might work… it just might work.

The Apple Keyboard update is 19.4MB. Not long ago we would have thought nothing of shipping an entire Disc in some format or another with this small package on it. These days, though, it does make much more sense to just download it. Every computer is on the internet, what the hell is the point of having one that isn’t these days? (save very special situations, of course)

As we’re moving to places where installing any software is seen as superfluous, it’s not surprising that we should see a lot less extra weight in packaging given to install and driver CDs.