Back a few months, I somewhat hesitantly bought a Magic Keyboard 2 shortly after my purchase of an MBP 15 2018. I wanted an external wireless keyboard for the laptop because 1) the laptop was uncomfortably hot when connected to an external display 2) I didn’t want to spend money on a dongle just yet to use other keyboards like the HHKB Pro2 3) I liked the freedom of being wireless and 4) I just wanted to try it.
I’ve used it for a few months for at least an hour every day. And here are my picks of goods and bads.
Pros
- Ultra-portable and light. I adjust my posture quite a lot. So I found its weight (or lack thereof) never an issue when re-position the keyboard on my desk.
- Long battery
- Never disconnected once.
- Mapped to useful functions like brightness control, volume up/down.
Cons
- No multipairing. I knew it didn’t have multi paring , but I actually didn’t believe it. I honestly thought Apple had a clever way of *magically* handing the pairing off to whichever device I am using at the moment. There is no such magic.
- Rattly (noisy). I have hypersensitive ears and this drove me nuts.
- Small arrow cluster. Impossible to reach without leaving the home row, but the problem is the up/down arrows are frustratingly miniature in size. I learned great many keyboard shortcuts though.
- Eject button for.. what?
- Expensive. Comparatively speaking, this is the cheapest keyboard in my fleet. Yet I still find its value proposition a bit hard to swallow.
- Nothing to write home about on its tactility of the switch. I actually preferred the infamous butterfly switch keyboard on my MacBook Pro which I found to be very crisp, precise and tactile (of course, I try not to use the butterfly keyboard because it was repeating the ‘O’ key out of the box).
I stopped using the Magic Keyboard on a daily basis now. I don’t know if I want to keep this around. I will see if I can get great use out of it on my iPad instead.