Review: Apple’s cheap and cheerful iPhone SE

It’s admittedly difficult to have a comparative conversation about the iPhone SE. This device isn’t really in the same neighborhood as the iPhone 11, even though it’s furnished with the same plush carpeting and fluffy armchairs.

The iPhone SE is a value offering. Even though I will use comparatives throughout this piece to help put it in the context of Apple’s lineup, that probably doesn’t matter to the vast majority of potential customers for this device.

Simply, it’s a super value for the price, just smashing really. And a damn good phone. Alas, I am too used to no home button for it to be really appealing to me, but this is going to be a great phone for millions of people. And talk about timing on the value side of things — $399 for an iPhone with Apple’s latest power plant on board is huge.

The quick response to the iPhone SE was that it was ‘an iPhone 8 with iPhone 11 internals’. That’s…well, that’s true. There was some general sentiment of shruggery about Apple producing a phone out of their ‘spare’ parts. But, dear reader, your level of excitement about that is very likely going to be tied closely to how much you can afford to spend on a phone, how much you care about camera quality and how much of a priority the size of your phone is to you.

Let’s begin at the end.

Size and feel

It’s smaller, but not too small. If you’re keening for a 4” phone you won’t find the solace you desire here, but it’s refreshingly thin and light and very easy in the reach department. If those things are vital for you, it’s the only game in town with fresh internals.

I actually bought an old iPhone SE a while back as a pocket device, but I found that I could no longer reliably type on a 4” phone.

I bought the older iPhone SE because I wanted a super pocket phone for lightweight carry. But sad to say I have lost the ability to type on that size of screen. And I wonder if I ever really could. Was it a dream.

— Matthew Panzarino (@panzer) April 15, 2020

The new iPhone SE is just fine in that regard, and 4.7” is what I consider to be my lower limit for typing reliably. That, of course, does not apply if your hands are smaller or your fingers are shorter than mine. If that’s the case, you may still find the iPhone SE to be too large for your tastes. But alongside current iPhones it is practically petite.

Touch ID makes an appearance on the iPhone SE — fortuitously as we enter a world where many of us will be mask wearers for some time and Face ID is naturally limited in its effectiveness.

Pushing the home button is so awkward. The insane durability and utility of the swipe-able interface presented in the iPhone X jumps out hard here. Those swipe gestures are so natural and organic now that breaking them is no easy feat. If you are coming from a current Touch ID device you’ll be ok, but it will be a big adjustment from, say, an iPhone X.

There’s not much more to say because we’ve seen this design in the iPhone 8. It still feels good and modern.

I didn’t have enough time to do a serious battery life test but it seemed…fine? It’s so hard to tell the first couple of days anyway with indexing and other background stuff happening. Apple also says that the new iPhone SE is IP67 rated for up to 1 meter for 30 minutes so it’s still dunk proof, one of the biggest reducers of accidental damage to come to iPhone in the years since the first SE.

Camera

The iPhone SE’s camera system is a rare monocular addition to the lineup. It’s a single, wide-angle camera with an effective 28mm focal length. This is slightly narrower than we’re used to seeing in iPhones these days, most of which hit around 26mm. This means a slightly closer crop on photos. There is no telephoto lens, just like the iPhone XR.

The iPhone SE gets a boost from the totally new image pipeline of the iPhone 11 and 11 Pro. The ISP and the Neural Engine of the A13 processor give it more help in a variety of ways, especially given that so much of what makes up photography is in now really computer math.

Even with the painful lack of a telephoto lens, this is still one of the better smartphone cameras on the market because it has the full imaging pipeline of the iPhone 11 behind it. If it didn’t, I think that it would feel much ‘older’ in terms of imaging quality, but it speaks to how much of photography is driven by the CPU or GPU rather than the lens and sensor these days.

This proves out, as in my tests, the iPhone SE camera was much improved over the iPhone 8, and offered more portrait modes than the iPhone XR. The additional modes focus on cutting subjects out of the background. Their inclusion is tied directly to the ability of the Neural Engine (a portion of the A13’s chip dedicated to high frequency low-lift machine learning tasks) to execute segmentation masking and semantic rendering.

It also records expanded dynamic range 4k 30fps video and 4k 60fps video with cinematic stabilization.

The biggest practical benefit of the pipeline, though, is the improved Smart HDR feature which I covered in my iPhone 11 review. This really improves detail across massive tonal ranges from bright highlights to shadow detail. While it does not magically make the iPhone SE the same class of image making device that the iPhone 11 is, it goes a long way to making your average snapshot look the best it can.

It does, and should, blow away the ‘old’ iPhone SE when it comes to sharpness, color rendition and dynamic range. It’s clearly better than its predecessor and clearly better than the iPhone 8, which it will most directly replace in Apple’s lineup.

For those considering stepping downward in their choice of device, it’s worth noting here explicitly that nearly across the board the image quality was just pounded by the iPhone 11 Pro. Which is, on one level, expected. The iPhone 11 Pro is a much more expensive device.

The iPhone SE does not have Night Mode. It performs notably worse than the iPhone 11 in dark areas because of this. It does have optical stabilization on the rear camera, which helps, but don’t expect the same performance in those tough conditions as the more expensive phones.

Given that the camera performs well across most other vectors, this is probably one of the biggest things in this category to recommend the iPhone 11 over the iPhone SE. That is assuming that we’re even having that conversation. Given that so many people use the iPhone as their primary camera, however, I think it’s one worth having. If you are pretty comfortable with ‘whatever’ pictures the iPhone takes, the SE is going to deliver with flying colors. You get a bunch of technical improvements and performance leaps behind the scenes and a solid, if not amazing, optical front end. Basically, It is what it is.

Screen

I prefer the iPhone SE’s color rendition to the iPhone XR. Though, on paper, the Liquid Retina Display and the Retina HD Display should be pretty much the same performance wise, there’s always been something a bit off-putting to me about the XR’s color tone — with True Tone off and at the same brightness, the iPhone SE tends to be more neutral warm with the iPhone XR ending up on the cooler end of the spectrum.

These observations are, by definition, anecdotal. And the panels that Apple is using in the iPhone SE are not really anything special — they are run of the mill ‘fantastic’, as is usual for the iPhone. The iPhone 11 Pro’s OLED screen, of course, trumps easily on black levels, color and tone.

The main differences between the iPhone XR and the iPhone SE screen come down to the ‘edge-to-edge’ design of the XR’s wraparound display and the SE’s more standard rectangle. Well, that and tap-to-wake.

The 32% difference in total pixels between the two devices is a complete non-factor in my testing, by the way. Once again, not a huge surprise given the same 326ppi.

As with the gesture situation, I really, really miss tap-to-wake, which seems. Not being able to wake your phone to peek at the screen with a touch is a step backward in usability for anyone who has previously owned an iPhone with that feature and I highly encourage people considering a move “down” to the SE to factor in losing that utility.

If you’re coming from another iPhone without it you’ll be fine, but if you had it, you’re gonna miss it.

Greasing the chute

The iPhone SE adds lubrication to what has historically been the most frictional section of Apple’s entry chute to its ecosystem. Where Apple previously relied on the the churn of used devices being put into the market or handed down to family members as a ’spackle’ for the low-end onramp, it now has a first party offering. One that is actually an amazing value for the price.

That lower price point can be looked at through a purely pragmatic prism: it’s cheaper and it fills in gaps in Apple’s device pricing umbrella. The last time people thought Apple was making a play for affordability was back in 2013 during the subsidization era, with the iPhone 5C. That didn’t actually help with the onramp issue because Apple did not commit to a ‘cheap phone’ strategy on any real level. Instead of the low end phone everyone expected, it released a relatively high-end phone as a branching upgrade path for iPhone 5 users.

This time around, we get to see exactly how a ‘cheap’ iPhone will perform.

I know Apple executives hate that word, but there’s a great UK idiom that I’ve always loved: cheap and cheerful. That’s exactly what the iPhone SE is. Attractive, inexpensive and pleasant to use. Not a bad tagline for a device.

But what does the company get out of it, really? Is undercutting the price of the iPhone XR or other devices worth it in the long run?

To fully understand the iPhone SE’s appeal for Apple, here’s a few bullet points to consider:

• People in Apple’s universe spend money with Apple.
• Once people enter Apple’s world, they are often very satisfied and do not leave.
• People are rewarded for entry with an extremely affordable device that will be supported for 5 years or more — an easy industry peak.
• Revenue generated per U.S. iPhone hit $80 in 2018.
• Subscription revenue for U.S. mobile apps jumped 21% in 2019.
• Worldwide app stores saw record consumer spend of $120B in 2019.

Back in 2018, analyst Horace Dediu noted that Apple appeared to be emphasizing a ‘lasts longer’ strategy for iPhones. The strategy, he noted, prioritized usage and users over units sold, which became reinforced when Apple stopped reporting unit shipments data and boosted the metrics it doled out about its Services category.

Basically, the longer that Apple keeps iPhones in circulation, the less they will sell on an individual basis — but the longer they would keep people in the ecosystem.

All of this adds up to the fact that Apple stands to gain far more from making the front door wider than it does from making the threshold higher. The iPhone SE opens up new audiences for Apple. It’s an ideal phone for first time iPhone users, young buyers getting their first device and people currently on a budget.

Besides being the first attempt by Apple at this market in the modern smartphone era, it’s also the first iPhone since the company pivoted heavily into the services business. Apple saw that every iPhone needed to give the breath of life to more business for its other divisions as the market for devices entered its oxygen-saturation phase.

The iPhone SE will bring, or graduate, people into the Apple ecosystem and push money into the services category of its business for years to come. Even if they keep the device for years and never upgrade.

In a time of severe market disruption, where big consumer purchases may take a back seat, Apple has timed the iPhone SE perfectly to serve a real need. The barrier to entry is lower and customers know that they will be served by this purchase for 2-5 years with full backing of Apple’s software support and far better security and privacy track record than the rest of the field. Right now, as we’re all isolated, these pocket machines make us more connected to one another and provide us a lifeline of information about the best way to stay healthy and safe.

As smartphones became ubiquitous and then commonplace, they have taken on the role of pariah and scapegoat for a number of societal ills. The focus on superficiality, obsession with small things or even plain old sloth. Now, all of those equations have been scribbled out. Just as parents have re-thought the idea of screen time while we’re all locked up and social media has become a vital tool for maintaining our sanity rather than bragging — we’ve also come to realize that maybe the smartphone stands between us and real isolation.

The iPhone SE has come along right as Apple has an opportunity to make those benefits available to the widest audience.

This iteration of the iPhone is one of those rare moments where the business gets served, the users get served and everyone comes out of it with a good deal.

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Vivaldi browser gets built-in tracking blocker, goes GA on Android

Vivaldi, the browser launched by former Opera CEO Jon von Tetzchner, has long positioned itself as a highly customizable alternative to Chrome and Firefox for power users. Today, the team is launching version 3.0 of its desktop browser, with built-in tracker and ad blockers, and it’s bringing its Android browser out of beta.

I’ve long been a fan of Vivaldi, but the company was relatively late to the tracking protection game. Now, it’s doubling down on this, by integrating a blocklist powered by DuckDuckGo’s Tracker Radar.

Like competing browsers, Vivaldi offers three blocking levels that users can easily toggle on and off for individual websites. Those blocking levels are relatively blunt, though, with the options to either block trackers, block trackers and ads or disable blocking. Competitors like Edge offer slightly more nuanced options for blocking trackers, though I would expect Vivaldi to adopt a similar scheme over time.

For the most part, the Vivaldi team always said that it would delegate ad blocking to extensions, though it added the option to block highly intrusive ads in the middle of last year. And while the company still notes that blocking trackers provides enough privacy protection, with today’s update, it now also gives users the option to block virtually all ads without the need to download any extensions (as a Chromium-based browser, Vivaldi supports all Chrome extensions).

Also new in the desktop version is a clock. Yes. A clock. That may sound like a weird feature, given that your desktop of choice surely features a clock, but like all things Vivaldi, you can a) remove it and b) there is actually some usefulness here as you can, for example, set up timers if you’re into Pomodoro or similar productivity techniques. And because it is Vivaldi, you can set all kinds of custom alarms and countdown timers, too.

[gallery ids="1978141,1978140,1978119"]

As for the mobile version, which is now generally available for Android 5 and higher, the most important fact is probably that it exists, given how most users expect to be able to easily sync their bookmarks, passwords and browsing history between mobile and desktop. As with other browsers, you can choose what you want to sync.

Like the desktop version, Vivaldi for Android now also features a tracking and ad blocker. There’s also a built-in screenshot tool and support for Vivaldi notes, which also sync between devices.

The mobile browser isn’t quite as flexible as the desktop version, with its plethora of options, but that’s probably not what you’re looking for in a mobile browser anyway. But having a stable mobile browser that can accompany the desktop version is a big deal for Vivaldi and may give users who were on the sidelines a reason to take another look at it.

Out of the box, there’s no other browser that will give you the kind of flexibility Vivaldi does.

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Apple’s new Fraggle Rock series was shot on iPhones in its creators’ homes

There are few more messages more timely than the opening line, “Dance your cares away, worry’s for another day” (or is it “worries?”). Today the familiar Fraggle Rock bass line returns, along with the titular felt underground dwellers, as the first of a new series of mini-episodes hits Apple TV+.

Apple’s streaming service will post free short episodes of Fraggle Rock: Rock On! each Tuesday, starring a familiar parade of Muppets, including Gobo, Red, Boober, Mokey, Wembley, Uncle Traveling Matt and those poor, hardworking Doozers.

Arguably even more interesting than the show itself are the circumstances of its production. As the global COVID-19 pandemic has brought television production to a screeching halt, the show’s producers have taken to creating the show remotely. “In accordance with the Covid-19 ‘Safer at Home’ guidelines,” Apple writes in a release, “Fraggle Rock: Rock On! is all shot on iPhone 11 phones from the homes of the production team and individual artists from all over the U.S.”

If nothing else, the current pandemic has proven how creative people can be with an internet account and a lot of free time. It already has already reshaped how we view musical and comedy performances, as a long parade of creatives have opened their homes to the internet. A new Fraggle Rock series demonstrates what can be done when you add a bit of production values into the mix.

The series joins a number of familiar childhood properties being revamped for the platform, including Peanuts (Snoopy in Space) and Ghostwriter.

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Apple’s new Fraggle Rock series was shot on iPhones in its creators’ homes

There are few more messages more timely than the opening line, “Dance your cares away, worry’s for another day” (or is it “worries?”). Today the familiar Fraggle Rock bass line returns, along with the titular felt underground dwellers, as the first of a new series of mini-episodes hits Apple TV+.

Apple’s streaming service will post free short episodes of Fraggle Rock: Rock On! each Tuesday, starring a familiar parade of Muppets, including Gobo, Red, Boober, Mokey, Wembley, Uncle Traveling Matt and those poor, hardworking Doozers.

Arguably even more interesting than the show itself is the circumstances of its production. As the global COVID-19 pandemic has brought television production to a screeching halt, the show’s producers have taken to creating the show remotely. “ In accordance with the Covid-19 ‘Safer at Home’ guidelines,” Apple writes in a release, “Fraggle Rock: Rock On! is all shot on iPhone 11 phones from the homes of the production team and individual artists from all over the U.S.”

If nothing else, the current pandemic has proven how creative people can be with an internet account and a lot of free time. It’s already has already reshaped how we view musical and comedy performances as a long parade of creatives have opened their homes to the internet. A new Fraggle Rock series demonstrates what can be done when you add a bit of production values into the mix.

The series joins a number of familiar childhood properties being revamped for the platform, including Peanuts (Snoopy in Space) and Ghostwriter.

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Apple expands App Store, Music, iCloud and other services to dozens of additional markets

Apple said today it is launching its services App Store, Apple Podcasts, iCloud, and Apple Music to dozens of new additional markets in Africa, Europe, Asia-Pacific, and Middle East among others in what is one of the biggest geographical pushes from one of the world’s biggest firms.

The App Store, Apple Arcade, Apple Podcasts, and iCloud are now available in 20 additional markets, whereas the iPhone-maker’s music streaming service Apple Music has launched in an additional 52 nations.

The App Store, Apple Arcade, Apple Music, Apple Podcasts and iCloud are now available in the following countries and regions:

• Africa: Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Gabon, Libya, Morocco, Rwanda, and Zambia.
• Asia-Pacific: Maldives and Myanmar.
• Europe: Bosnia and Herzegovina, Georgia, Kosovo, Montenegro, and Serbia.
• Middle East: Afghanistan (excluding Apple Music) and Iraq.
• Oceania: Nauru (excluding Apple Music), Tonga, and Vanuatu.

Apple Music is expanding to the following countries and regions:

• Africa: Algeria, Angola, Benin, Chad, Liberia, Madagascar, Malawi, Mali, Mauritania, Mozambique, Namibia, Republic of the Congo, Senegal, Seychelles, Sierra Leone, Tanzania, and Tunisia.
• Asia-Pacific: Bhutan.
• Europe: Croatia, Iceland, and North Macedonia.
• Latin America and the Caribbean: the Bahamas, Guyana, Jamaica, Montserrat, St. Lucia, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Suriname, Turks and Caicos, and Uruguay.
• Middle East: Kuwait, Qatar, and Yemen.
• Oceania: Solomon Islands.

“We’re delighted to bring many of Apple’s most beloved Services to users in more countries than ever before,” said Oliver Schusser, Apple’s vice president of Apple Music and International Content, in a statement.

“We hope our customers can discover their new favorite apps, games, music, and podcasts as we continue to celebrate the world’s best creators, artists, and developers,” he added.

App Store is now available in 175 countries and regions, whereas Apple Music has reached 167 markets.

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Daily Crunch: Apple’s new Magic Keyboard, reviewed

The new Magic Keyboard is good, Uber launches new delivery services and Facebook releases its Gaming app ahead of schedule.

Here’s your Daily Crunch for April 20, 2020, a totally regular date with no cultural significance whatsoever. Also, just a reminder: We’re holding our first Extra Crunch Live session, with Aileen Lee and Ted Wang, at 1:30pm Eastern!

1. Apple’s Magic Keyboard review: Laptop-class typing comes to iPad Pro

TechCrunch’s Editor in Chief Matthew Panzarino says that, for the past two years, he’s typed nearly every word while traveling on the iPad Pro’s Smart Keyboard Folio. Even so, he acknowledged that, aside from its reliability and durability, the Keyboard Folio kind of stinks.

In contrast, the new Magic Keyboard is a first-class typing experience, full stop.

2. Uber adds retail and personal package delivery services as COVID-19 reshapes its business

Uber Direct is a delivery platform for retail items, while Connect is a peer-to-peer package delivery service for sending goods to family and friends. This marks the most aggressive foray yet for Uber into courier services after it already introduced grocery items to its Uber Eats platform.

3. Facebook’s new Gaming app launches on Android, with iOS version coming soon

The social media giant pushed the app out two months prior to its scheduled unveiling — amid a global pandemic that’s left people all over the world isolated at home, rapidly burning through entertainment options.

4. Hundreds of academics back privacy friendly coronavirus contact tracing apps

A letter, signed by nearly 300 academics and published Monday, praised recent announcements from Apple and Google to build an opt-in and decentralized way of allowing individuals to know if they have come into contact with someone confirmed to be infected with the novel coronavirus.

5. Top investors predict what’s ahead for Boston’s VC scene in Q1

While Boston’s startup market announced a number of huge rounds that bolstered its total venture dollars raised in the first quarter, there were signs of weakness: Deal volume was still a little under the pace set in 2018. (Extra Crunch membership required.)

6. Marc Andreessen’s call to arms: build something meaningful

In a new essay published over the weekend, Andreessen writes that to “reboot the American dream” we need to “demand more of our political leaders, of our CEOs, our entrepreneurs, our investors. We need to demand more of our culture, of our society. And we need to demand more from one another. We’re all necessary, and we can all contribute, to building.”

7. This week’s TechCrunch podcasts

The latest full-length episode of Equity discusses Robinhood’s plans to raise new capital, while the Monday news roundup looks at the U.K.’s financial aid for startups. And on Original Content, we reviewed “Tigertail” and the full season of “Devs” (both are good, but everyone should be watching “Devs”).

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here.

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Apple’s Magic Keyboard Review: Laptop class typing comes to iPad Pro

Over the past two years, I’ve typed nearly every word I’ve written while traveling on the iPad Pro’s Smart Keyboard Folio. For more on why you can see my iPad Pro review here.

For the purposes of this look at the new Magic Keyboard, though, you should probably just know two things:

1. It was reliable, incredibly durable and never once failed me.
2. It kind of stunk in every other way.

The Keyboard Folio’s plastic coated surface made it impervious to spills, but it also made the keys much less responsive. It rendered them unable to give your fingers the feedback necessary to confirm that a key had been struck, leading me to adopt a technique where I just hit every key with maximum strength at all times.

The new Magic Keyboard is as different from that device as the new MacBook Pro keyboards are from the low profile ones that dominated headlines over the last couple of years. It’s a huge jump forward in usability for the iPad Pro — and for last year’s model too.

I am very relieved I don’t have to slam my fingers onto the plastic keyboard anymore, because over long and fast typing sessions I could feel a numbness that would begin to radiate from the tips of my fingers a bit. An enervation of sorts. It wasn’t precisely painful but it was noticeable.

The Magic Keyboard offers a lovely, backlit deck that holds its own against the 16” MacBook Pro and the new MacBook Air for best portable keyboards. The key travel is excellent — in between the two laptops in my opinion — and the feel is tight, responsive and precise. This is a first class typing experience, full stop.

I’ve been testing the three keyboards alongside one another for the past few days and I can’t stress enough how stable the keys are. Even the MacBook Air allows a tiny bit of key shift if you touch your finger to it and gently circle it — though the MacBook Pro is better. There’s such a small amount of that here that it’s almost imperceptible.

It’s a tad spongier than the 16” MBP but more firm than the MacBook Air, which has a bit more return and travel. In my opinion, this keyboard is ‘louder’ (due to the plastic casing being more resonant than the aluminum), than the 16” MBP, but about the same as the MacBook Air. The throw feels similar to the 16” though, with the Air being slightly deeper but ‘sloppier’.

So a hybrid between those two keyboards as far as feel goes, but a clear descendant of the work that was done to turn those offerings around.

Construction

Among my biggest concerns was that Apple would get overly clever with the hinge design, making the the typing an exercise in wobble. Happy to say here that they took the clear path here and made it as sturdy as possible, even if that was at the cost of variability.

The hinge is a simple limit stop design that opens far less than you’d expect and then allows a second hinge to engage to open in an arc between the 80 and 130 degrees. The 90 degree and fully open positions basically mimic the angles that were offered by the grooves of the Keyboard Folio — but now you can choose any in-between position that feels natural to you.

Apple has obviously put this hard stop fold out limit in place to maintain balance on tables and laps, and its clever use of counter opposing forces with the second hinge combines to limit tipping and to make typing on a lap finally a completely viable thing to do. The fact that you don’t have to hammer the keyboard to type also makes this a better proposition.

For typing, these positions should be just fine for the vast majority of users. And the solid (very high friction) hinge means that the whole thing is very sturdy feeling, even with more moving parts. I have been quite comfortable grabbing the whole assembly of the 12.9” iPad Pro plus Magic Keyboard by the deck of the keyboard and carrying it around, much in the way I’d carry a laptop. No worries about accidental floppiness or detachment.

At the same time, the new design that floats the iPad in the air allows you to quickly pop it off with little effort by either your left or right hand. This makes the Magic Keyboard take on the use case of a desktop based dock, something that never felt right with the Keyboard Folio.

The touchpad physically moves here, and is not a haptic pad, but it is clickable across its entire surface. It’s also a laptop-class trackpad, proving that Apple’s engineering teams still have a better idea about how to make a trackpad that works crisply and as expected than any other hardware team out there.

I do love the soft touch coating of the case itself, but I believe it will wear in a similar fashion to these kinds of surfaces on other devices. It will likely develop shiny spots on either side of the trackpad on the hand rest areas.

The responsive half arrow keys are extremely welcome.

Some other details, quirks and upper limits

The camera placement situation is much improved here, as you’re less likely to hold the left side of the iPad to keep it stable. The lift of the keyboard (at times about an inch and a bit) means that the eye line, while still not ideal, is improved for zoom calls and the like. Less double chin up the nose action. Apple should still move the iPad Pro’s camera on future versions.

The keyboard’s backlight brightness is decent and adjustable in the settings pane once it’s attached to iPad Pro. The unit did use more battery in my tests, though I haven’t had it long enough to assign any numbers to it. I did notice during a recent Facetime call that the battery was draining faster than it could charge, but that is so far anecdotal and I haven’t had the time to reproduce it in testing.

This is not the case that artists have been waiting for. This case does not rotate around backwards like the keyboard folio, meaning that you’re going to be popping it off the case if you’re going to draw on it at all. In some ways the ease of removal feels like an Apple concession. ‘Hey, we couldn’t fit all this in and a way to position it at a drawing angle, so we made it really easy to get it loose.’ It works, but I hope that more magic happens between now and the next iteration to find a way to serve both typing and drawing in one protected configuration.

A little quirk: when it’s tilted super far back to the full stop I sometimes nick the bottom edge of the iPad with my fingers when hitting numbers — could be my typing form or bigger hands but I thought it worth mentioning.

It’s a bit heavy. At 700g for the 12.9” keyboard, it more than doubles the weight of the whole package. The larger iPad Pro and keyboard is basically the weight of a MacBook Air. Get the 11” if weight is a concern. This keyboard makes the iPad 12.9″ package feel very chunky. The

The fact that this keyboard works on the older iPad Pro (the camera just floats inside the cutout) means that this is a fantastic upgrade for existing users. It really makes the device feel like it got a huge upgrade without having to buy a new core unit, which fits with Apple’s modular approach to iPad Pro and also stands out as pretty rare in a world where the coolest new features are often hardware related and new device limited.

At $300 and $350 for each size of Magic Keyboard, the price is something you must think about up front. Given that it is now easily the best keyboard available for these devices I think you need to consider it a part of the package price of the device. If you can’t swing that, consider another option — it’s that good.

I’d love more angles of use here and I’m hoping that they include more — that said! If you work seriously with the iPad and that work is based on typing, the Magic Keyboard is essentially mandatory. It’s the dream keyboard for all of us who found ourselves crossing the Rubicon into iPad as primary computer over the past couple of years. It’s not without its caveats, but it is a refreshingly straightforward and well executed accessory that makes even older iPads feel like better laptops than laptops.

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