Apple originally said it was coming in May, so this is earlier than expected.
Apple has started taking orders for its trackpad-equipped Magic Keyboard peripheral for the iPad Pro, and it plans to put units in buyers’ hands as early as next week. The company previously announced that the peripheral was coming in May, so this is a little ahead of the previously described schedule.
This peripheral works with the 2018 and 2020 iPad Pro models (both the 11- and 12.9-inch sizes).
The focus might seem to be on the trackpad because that’s such a departure for this platform, but the keyboard is modeled after the Magic Keyboard, which has been sold as a standalone peripheral and which replaced the butterfly keyboards in the 16-inch MacBook Pro and 2020 MacBook Air.
The scissor-mechanism keys are backlit and Apple says they deliver 1mm travel. There are 30 supported language layouts, including English, simplified Chinese, Japanese, Spanish, and others.
Apple seems to have designed this peripheral to draw some attention; it actually holds the iPad Pro up in the air in a “floating cantilevered” design, so it looks a bit different than other similar peripherals. The angle the iPad is held at can be adjusted up to 130 degrees.
The Magic Keyboard also supports USB-C passthrough charging, meaning that this is one of the few ways you can keep the iPad Pro plugged into power while making use of its sole USB-C port for an external display, storage, a musical instrument, or whatever your use case calls for.
Apple introduced trackpad support to modern iPad models in iPadOS 13.4. Users could already use third-party trackpads or Apple’s Magic Trackpad Mac peripheral with iPads starting when that software release was deployed a few weeks ago. iPadOS has trackpad gesture support that draws inspiration from macOS in many ways.
The Magic Keyboard for iPad Pro costs $299 for the 11-inch iPad Pro and $349 for the 12.9-inch model. There is also education-specific pricing for these two sizes at $279 and $329, respectively.
Listing image by Apple
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SAMUEL AXON
