What is hidden in Apple's top-secret laboratory, the birthplace of black technology?

Insiders call it Vallco Parkway. A quick turn off Highway 280 from Apple's Infinite Loop headquarters in Cupertino, this unassuming building is like a nerve center for the fingers of every Macintosh user. This is the Input Device Design Lab. It's where Apple designs and tests prototypes of new keyboards, trackpads, and mice. It's crammed with a treasure trove of precision instruments that would make a geek excited.

Until now, no journalist or press photographer had ever stepped foot inside the lab. But to herald the arrival of the new iMac—perhaps a move by the once-closed company to demonstrate a more transparent attitude—Apple opened its doors to Backchannel (well, part of it) and talked about its new iMac and overall strategy. Here's what I saw.

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In a user testing lab, Apple sits survey subjects in front of keyboards and connects them to sensors to test the physical effects of typing on the devices. "We bring in people from all walks of life to do internal user research," said Kate Bergeron, vice president of ecosystem products and technology. (She is the decision maker for Apple's input devices in general.) "We do tests on all keyboards for muscle fatigue and memory, sound, accuracy and other things."

"Typing accuracy is one of the metrics we use, along with how long it takes users to adjust to a new keyboard," Bergeron said. She claimed these new tests show "users adjust to it faster and are able to find the center of the keys more accurately."

We enter a heavily guarded space. This is one of many "feature labs," Bergeron says. It's filled with fancy new machines, most custom-built by Apple to test its devices. In many cases, they methodically click, tap, and move their mouses like robots to measure the performance and durability of the devices. The results are analyzed by sophisticated software. "Every new product needs its own test," she says. "We have to design fixtures to test these products. The team does a lot of work to nail down the features of different designs as quickly as possible."

The machine pictured above has an awl — it looks a bit like the little screwdriver you use to fix glasses — that taps each keycap multiple times, “Today, every keyboard we ship is tested at five points, including the four corners and the center,” Bergeron said.

Another robot typist is used to test durability. In Apple's tests, the keyboard is pushed to 5 million keystrokes. (Some of these demonstrations were shown to us, but some of the testing equipment comes from Chinese assembly lines.) In addition to testing their prototypes, Apple also checks that the official production versions are qualified. This keeps the input device lab very busy all year round.

What's a design lab without a 3D printer? Apple uses its MakerBots to print all sorts of gadgets, like custom stands that hold devices at the perfect angle while testing them.

Apple tests its mouse and trackpad on a variety of surfaces—glass, metal, melamine, wood, reinforced concrete. "We figured out what geometry works on what kind of table," Bergeron said. Here, a robotic arm pushes and pulls a trackpad on a wooden platform for testing.

“We iterated many times to get the perfect click feel,” said John Ternus, vice president of Mac, iPad, Ecosystem and Audio Engineering, “to find that magical experience for users.”

Each keyboard represents a different challenge for Apple. It requires customizing the mechanism under the keys for a specific device. To see if this is possible, Apple builds prototypes that are much larger than the actual keys, almost like the piano keys Tom Hanks danced on in the movie Grown Ups. If you look closely at the long table on the left in the photo above, near the chairs, you can see the prototypes that Apple built to test new keyboards.

In the Sound Room, Apple tests the sounds its products make. "To get the right feel, you need the right sound," Ternus said. The main part of the room is a giant soundproof chamber. It's the centerpiece of a system Apple created to test the micro-localization of sound. Apple put it to great use when testing the new Magic Keyboard. "There are structural differences between the prototype and the product that will be sold, so this particular keyboard required a lot of supervision and attention to make a really good mechanism," Bergeron said. "In one test, the mechanism produced a sound that we didn't like. So we went in and changed the material of the mechanism to get a sound that customers would like to hear."

When testing the new Magic Trackpad 2, Apple also needed to fine-tune the sound. The sound of "pressing down" and "pushing up" had to be just right. Of course, the sound test machine and the various sound waves it captures can't tell the difference, and ultimately the so-called correct sound must be determined by humans. "We sit in the room, and people who can really sing - not me - find the right pitch for the sound." Ternus said, "This pitch is too high, it needs to be lowered a little bit. In the end, the final decision comes from, how do we feel about this sound? "After all, our senses are the best input device laboratory."