Also, I’m surprised that Apple didn’t use some of that seed money from Microsoft offered in the late 1990’s to come up with better keyboards such as Microsoft’s excellent split-key ergonomic keyboards. Microsoft makes some excellent keyboards... how they avoided screwing them up is a wonder.
Apple also had some of the best keyboards around... good feel, good response.
Microsoft's purchase of $150,000,000 in preferred stock was not seed money when Apple had almost 1.5 billion dollars in cash when that purchase was made. Apple was in the middle of developing the iMac, OS X server, and starting development of the iPod. I think their choices of where to spend any cash they had were the correct ones... except the money they spent on the original iMac's mouse...
I hope they got a refund...
Oh gawd. The original hockey puck mouse was absolutely TERRIBLE to use! I'm glad Apple designers came to their senses and came out with better mouse pointers, though they avoided the use of multibutton mouse pointers until only fairly recently with their Mighty Mouse pointer. Fortunately, recent versions of the MacOS supports third-party mouse pointers through the USB port, so most of the modern mouse pointers you can buy from Microsoft and Logitech do work under MacOS X with the right software driver, even high-end models like Logitech's MX Revolution and Microsoft's Wireless Natural Laser Mouse 6000.