When the first iPad Pro came out with its Smart Connector and Smart Keyboard, I loved it. No more messing with Bluetooth for a hardware keyboard. Plus, the very same thing that I used to protect my iPad was also providing me a keyboard! But it didn’t protect the back of the iPad. Also, after a few years, it broke. The contacts inside the keyboard came undone, and it no longer sent keypresses to my iPad. It was nice, but it was also fragile, a device built to fail.
The Magic Keyboard feels like something that’s built to last the lifetime of my iPad. Maybe more.
Replacing flimsy hinges and a case that only protects one side is a beast of a folio. The Magic Keyboard protects the front and back of the iPad Air (or Pro), along with a little bit on the sides. It adds so much bulk and weight, the iPad doubles in thickness. There’s a strong hinge with a USB-C connection now, instead of a thin piece of fabric with wires running through it.
The Magic Keyboard isn’t just a case with a keyboard. It tries to transform the iPad. Including a small multitouch trackpad and extra charging port gives the tiny iPad more freedom, and makes it feel like a small MacBook. This simple iPad accessory completely changes how you use your iPad for the better.
In This Article:
Ease of Use
How hard can it be to use? Magnets do most of the work. With nothing but magnets, the Magic Keyboard holds your iPad Air or iPad Pro “floating” above your keyboard. The Smart Connector on the back does the rest. The pins on the keyboard line up with the connector on your iPad. This allows you to deliver power to the iPad via the USB-C port on the Magic Keybaord, and for the iPad to deliver power to the keyboard for backlighting. All of this is seamless. But does it work well?
The new Smart Keyboard introduced two viewing angles for the iPad. The Magic Keyboard, however, has a hinge with a fully adjustable viewing angle. Unfortunately, the range isn’t fantastic. I almost always use it bent all the way back. Apple didn’t want the iPad to become too top heavy, so the hinge doesn’t allow the screen to go too far back. This makes it easy to balance, even on a lap. Fortunately, the iPad itself has a wide usable viewing angle, so the lack of range isn’t a large problem, but it is frustrating that you can’t get it perfect.
Speaking of using the Magic Keyboard on your lap, there’s another benefit. When you put a laptop on your, well, lap top, the heat from the processor and other internals goes right through the often metal shell of your device and into your thighs. It’s unpleasant. With the Magic Keyboard and your iPad, all the heat generating things are up in the iPad. Your lap doesn’t overheat. Great on a hot day. Or just any time you don’t want your lap burning. That should be all the time, right?
The last note will be about its weight. This actually doubles the size of your iPad and adds 606g to your iPad’s weight. How much does the iPad weigh? Well, by my kitchen scale, 474g. Yes, the Magic Keyboard is heavier than an iPad Air 4. You’re going to notice all of that extra bulk and weight. It’s still less than a MacBook Pro, which weighs around 2,000g. It’s just over half the weight of a MacBook, even with the keyboard. That’s still something you can take anywhere.
This is, in many ways, a docking station. Plop your iPad on it and it can charge and give you a laptop-like experience. Take it off and you have a tablet. Sure, you can’t use them together for a tablet experience, because the Magic Keyboard doesn’t fold back that far. But, honestly? That’s far more useful to me than something that is large and awkward to use as a tablet.
Magic Keyboard and iPadOS
My sudoku game is faster than ever!
iPadOS supports third party trackpads, mice, and other pointing accessories. Originally, this was just an accessibility tool, but Apple made it a core part of the experience in iPadOS 14. The cursor is a small round disk, which sort of “absorbs” into buttons and other items you can interact with. Then, it changes the angle of the button or icon to show where the cursor is within it. It sounds weird, but it’s quite natural, especially with a touch-oriented OS like iPadOS. It feels like you’re pushing a drop of water around. On top of that, it turns to a cursor over text, which makes selecting specific text much easier. Though iPadOS still isn’t perfect with this. Correcting spelling mistakes, for example, can be cumbersome as it is without a trackpad. You can’t trust “right click” that is, a two-finger click to register.
That is a multi-touch trackpad too. Swipe around pages with two fingers, or drag them to scroll. Use three fingers in a swiping motion to switch apps or return to the home screen. Many of the gestures from the macOS trackpad came over to the iPadOS trackpad. That’s good because, if you’re used to the gestures on macOS, you’ll feel right at home on the iPad. You may even forget you’re using something that isn’t a Mac.
Not all of the gestures are immediately intuitive. Pulling down the notification tray by pushing the cursor off the top of the screen is a bit awkward. The same is true of the sidebar app, which pulls in from the right side of the screen. Once you learn it, it’s easy to remember, but it’s admittedly not as intuitive as the other gestures.
The keyboard also adds keyboard shortcuts and some new capabilities in apps. Some apps and games are optimized for input from keyboards. I was surprised to find I could use a number of keys for the Good Sudoku app, speeding up my gameplay a bit with the keys.
The changes to iPadOS when you connect to a keyboard and trackpad feel natural. They’re welcome, and help the iPad feel like a rich experience.
Typing Feel
I’m a mechanical keyboard snob. Nothing measures up to my mechanical keyboards. I’ve built a few, and even started obsessing about dampening sounds and lubing switches and stabilizers. So, when it comes to typing feel, I’m picky. Still, I can accept a keyboard for what it is. A single mechanical switch is thicker than an iPad with the Magic Keyboard, and that’s not even including the keycaps (I like those tall too). So, expecting a mechanical keyboard feel from anything but a mechanical keyboard would be unreasonable. When I tell you the Magic Keyboard has a nice typing feel, I mean it has a nice typing feel for what it is.
And it does! For such a slim keyboard, it retains the snappiness of the new Apple MacBook keyboards, based on their original scissor switch designs. Fortunately, the horrendous butterfly keyboard is gone, and these keys have plenty of travel despite their slim size, and register firmly. It’s still bottoming out on a slim membrane-based keyboard, but I’ve used worse, like the Smart Keyboard or other butterfly keyboards Apple made. Those were far worse. This is actually a passable keyboard!
Keyboard Size and Layout
Yeah, I sort of slide my thumb for the space bar and I suppose that polishes it quickly.
The layout is similar to a “64%” layout. That is, your letter keys, number row, and arrow keys. The arrow keys are in an inverted ‘T’, which makes them much easier to identify and use by touch. On the iPad Air and 11-inch iPad Pro versions, some of the keys are half sized. Still, these are largely symbol keys you don’t use often. The rest is still a full-sized keyboard. Your muscle memory will continue to work, and each letter will be exactly where your fingers search for it.
Trackpad
My first Mac was a 2006 MacBook. I still have it, so I broke out the measuring tape. The touch-sensitive area of the 2006 MacBook trackpad is 100mm wide, and 49mm tall. Back then, MacBooks still had a button on the bottom of the trackpad, instead of using the entire area as a clickable surface. The iPad Air and 11-inch iPad Pro features a 100mm by 45mm trackpad. It’s noticeably smaller, but not by much. Pinch gestures are the only ones that are more difficult, the rest feels natural. And, while its smaller size does mean it’s sometimes faster to just poke the screen, the inclusion of it does allow you to sit back and have fine control over the cursor.
The trackpad itself is clickable across the entire surface. The click has a firm, unmistakable feel. I still felt more comfortably touching the screen for gestures like pinching to zoom or rotating. The height of the trackpad is just a little too small for pinching. But all other three finger gestures feel fine.
Odds and Ends
My biggest gripe is that a bug in Firefox that has existed for nearly six months now, has forced me to stop using Firefox as my default browser on my iPad. As it turns out, any hardware keyboard will cause the bug. When pressing Command, it can often open a duplicate tab. This leads to users quickly having many tabs open.
I did also note that it doesn’t work with Minecraft. Minecraft says it has keyboard support, but you can’t use the keyboard as a tool for navigating and mining. Not even crafting! You can use the mouse cursor like your finger, playing that way, but that’s not really playing.
Another issue is the lack of an escape key. You can set up modifier keys though, like you can in macOS. Then you can use the Caps Lock key as an escape key. It’s much better than accidentally shouting online.
A sort of mediocre note is that you forget that it’s “floating.” You don’t really reach under it or use the space under your iPad, so it’s just there. You forget that it’s kind of “floating” above your keyboard.
As for things I like that I haven’t mentioned, the key for switching keyboards is fantastic for pulling up an emoji picker. You can also do this with the macOS shortcut, Control + Command + Space, but having a button for it makes it much easier.
Having a USB-C port on both sides is incredibly convenient. The port on the Magic Keyboard is only for charging, but it’s great to be able to charge from either side of the device. Sometimes getting a cable around to the right side is tricky.
And that’s it for oddities. It’s a keyboard with a trackpad. It makes your iPad work a bit like a MacBook. Isn’t that odd enough?
Overall
This is the best iPad keyboard I’ve ever used. I love that it isn’t much larger than the footprint of the iPad, unlike cases that wrap around the entire device. This makes it less protective, but less bulky. However, it adds a lot of depth to the iPad. Both the back and the keyboard itself are quite thick. Still, this gave the keyboard a more tactile feel, and allows for backlighting as well. Both are nice to have. When Apple initially revealed it, I figured I’d go for the far cheaper Smart Keyboard, as it’s thinner and more reasonably priced. However, I managed to snag this Magic Keyboard for only $20 more than the Smart Keyboard Folio. The bulk? I can deal with it to have this keyboard instead of the fabric-like Smart Keyboard Folio. I had that on the Smart Keyboard for the first iPad Pro, and it’s not a great typing feel. This makes up for my first lousy experience with iPad keyboards.
The trackpad completely changes iPadOS, along with keyboard shortcuts. These two together make the iPad Air 4 or last two generations of the iPad Pro feel like a smaller MacBook. You get a portable MacBook with the convenience of a touchscreen and tactility of a physical keyboard and trackpad. It’s not perfect. iPadOS is designed for touch. But it works well enough that an iPad with this keyboard is more than suitable for most computer users. Except those who may need to use it for more complex operations at work, most general use, like writing, reading news, social networking, messaging and emails, or other tasks are perfectly at home on the iPad. This keyboard just makes all of that functionality more accessible, easier to use.
For $299, the Magic Keyboard is certainly overpriced. It’s a fantastic piece of tech, but it’s priced far too high. I was lucky enough to find it on sale on Amazon for $199. You can often find sales that knock $100 off the price of the keyboard. If you’re thinking about it, I recommend holding out for one of those deals, unless you’re really willing to pay the extra $100 to get it immediately. Between this and the Smart Keyboard Folio, I say take the additional weight and money and get the Magic Keyboard. It’ll make using your iPad everywhere, for everything, much easier. It’s definitely worth the investment to get a sturdier keyboard.
The Magic Keyboard makes the iPad as close to a Mac as it ever has been, and it works incredibly well. There are a few quirks that come from a peripheral designed for a computer OS on a touchscreen OS, but nothing serious. This is a fantastic addition to the iPad, and creates an experience unlike any other. A seamless tablet and mobile computer that actually excels at being both.