Thanks, @aikoels and @InsanelySane45. I have followed your instructions to no avail. Yes, followed them meticulously, I'm a software engineer, ex-computer science teacher, blablabla.
First, there's no "update tool" on SteelSeries's website. the only thing in "Drivers and downloads" is essentially made of SSE3 and SSE2, nothing else.
Second, I haven't had these:
I haven't had that and I should have seen that window since the system is rather new and not burdened yet by bloatware.
It is a shame and I am soooo mad, because I bought the Apex keyboard from their website and received it today. Back from work, I plug it in and SSE says a critical firmware update has to be done. The update fails and the keyboard becomes unresponsive. I have to disconnect it and reconnect it before the system recognizes it and it becomes available again. At this point, I haven't typed a single character with it yet in any application, be it a Steam chat or browser window.
I've opened a support ticket and I'll see what they offer. In the meantime, I think I'll plug the keyboard in to my laptop and see.
EDIT (2015-07-29): The ticket I've opened yesterday is turning into a typical support nightmare, which I hate more than anything else. The ticket I opened yesterday had a reply in which they essentially said "you need to open an RMA" as if I had strayed to the wrong section of the support. This is what I replied today:
Then I signed off with a "greetings". Anyway, this ends my relationship with Steelseries products because I can't stand support that doesn't even bother to understand the nature of the problem.
EDIT (2015-07-30): I have succeeded in updating the firmware by using an old laptop running Vista 32-bit edition with no problem aside from rebooting twice, ie once after the Apex was first connected and its driver installed and once more after SSE tried the update and Vista installed a driver for sth called "Apex bootloader". After that, the keyboard has been working fine on the desktop machine for which I bought it in the first place. No further reply from the Steelseries support other than what I've reported here yesterday.
