Apple's latest horror story just keeps getting scarier. Yesterday we horrified you all with chilling tales of how the four "special" keys on Apple's new Pro Keyboard hide a terrifying secret. An unsuspecting customer plugs that shiny new translucent slab into a two-month-old Mac, pops in an audio CD, presses the "Volume Up" key, and... nothing happens. A little creeped out, she then tries the "volume down" and "mute" keys, but the music emanating from the speakers of her Strawberry iMac DV stays exactly the same volume. Fighting the urge to scream, she races for the phone to call the police, but the lines have been cut. Slowly, she edges back to the keyboard... the music continues its eerie non-volume-changing pace... holding her breath, she presses the "media eject" key... and the CD keeps right on playing! AIIIIEEEEEEEEEEE!!! Pretty scary, huh, kids?

But if you thought that was frightening, just wait until you check out the sequel. You probably recall that U.S. Apple Store customers who had pre-ordered the Pro Keyboard received email notification of the "dead key" bug, and were given the choice of cancelling their orders, or buying the keyboard anyway and waiting for a software patch "early next year." Early next year? Doesn't that sound a little... well, slack to you? Surely Apple could hack together a fix in far less than four months. Does it seem like Apple's actively trying to persuade customers to cancel their orders? Don't answer yet-- consider the default action that Apple takes if that email is ignored: if the customer doesn't respond in thirty days, the order is cancelled automatically. Strange, n'est-ce pas?

If you think that's odd, consider the plight of those international Apple Store customers who are waiting for their new Pro Keyboards; most of them appear to have had their orders cancelled whether they liked it or not. According to MacNN, a customer reports that Apple cancelled his order for a Pro Keyboard without even telling him; when he asked why, the email he got back simply stated that "the keyboard is not available. The four new keys only work with the new Macs." Even stranger, a reader at MacInTouch received email from Apple Japan stating that his Pro Keyboard order was also cancelled-- but instead of blaming the four "dead keys," Apple Japan's rationale for the abrupt order cancellation was that the item had "slipped from a September ship date to early 2001."

Sounds like there's more to this problem than four dead keys. We always thought it was a little strange that Apple was making such a big deal about a handful of nonessential volume control and disk eject keys not working on older systems. (Maybe we're just eternal pessimists, but we never even expected the new keys to work on older systems.) Now we can't help wondering whether that was just a convenient excuse to cover massive production delays-- especially since Apple's four-month estimate for a software patch coincides nicely with Apple Japan's reported four-month shipping delay. Perhaps Apple Japan never got the memo about the "official" excuse to use when cancelling the orders?