Well, they're the best keyboards APPLE made, that's for sure xD .
Thems fightin' words
M0116 is sublime. It provides a full numpad, arrow keys (all in a row), a latching caps lock, and the Control key to the left of A.
Plus, Orange Alps. Positively dreamy.
Funny you should say that, I really like my M0116 to be honest. I was thinking of doing a video about it sometime near the end of the year. I agree the layout is quite workable, definitely better than TKL. But still, a fullsize... And the AEK could come with oranges, too, don't forget .
Very true! I've been meaning to look at getting a AEK for the caps, as long as the profile matched the M0116's. If they had a stepped caps/control (1.75u), then I could throw them on my SGI board. Their profile is pretty neat for a "flat" layout- all of the alphas (the middle rows) are all the same profile, while the # row is raised up with an extended stem, while the bottom row flattens out. The angle of the contour is also very comparable to that of IBM's caps, standing them up next to each other, just a bit shorter. The face, however, is a bit broader. And, up top, there's the magic button! Such a nice set.
The bottom row is really neat, especially if you convert it with TMK or something similar. I remapped the two keys to the left and right of the spacebar (\| and ~`) to a function layer when held, allowing me to use pgup/pgdn on the arrow keys. If you're a vim user (like me), then it's great for the pseudo-hjkl arrangement. I wish other layouts offered the 5x1u bottom row more often. I've seen it on Northgate keyboards and a few others, but most people with modern keyboards trying to do the same thing often go for replacing /? in favour of the up arrow, which is just messy.
Typing this, I actually just swapped my apple caps onto the SGI board, excluding the modifiers (they're non-standard size, like the AEKII's 0.25u shortened right mods), and they're really quite different. The profile is much more forward than the SGI's OEM profile, which is angled up. The Apple profile is very much like the OEM QWERTY row. The feeling of the plastic is also a bit different. The apple caps feel more close to ABS- not sticky, but smoother. The SGI caps are much more textured.
The M0116 is the board that got me into Alps.