When the topic of Apple products comes up, one of the things that comes to mind is if it’s worth it. Some things are. For example my 16″ MacBook Pro is absolutely worth it because of the speed and power that it has. Other things from Apple… I’m not so sure.
This is a review of one of those other things.
This is the Apple Magic Keyboard with Touch ID and Numeric Keypad. And it is $229 CDN in black which is what you see in the picture, or $209 CDN in white. In other words, if you want the black colour to match your setup or to hide dirt, you’ll have to pay Apple $20 more. And that is the start of why this keyboard might not be worth it for you.
Let’s touch on the fact that this keyboard doesn’t have backlighting. Which to me is completely bizarre as many lower priced keyboards do have backlighting. I’m sure that Apple will say that it has to do with battery life seeing as this is a wireless keyboard. But that doesn’t make sense to me because competing keyboards that cost way less than this one will connect wirelessly like this one does, and go weeks if not much longer on battery while having backlighting. And there are even a few keyboards that will do all of that and self adjust the backlighting on the fly using an ambient light sensor. Apple does this with the Magic Keyboards that are built into their MacBook Air and MacBook Pro models. So you have to wonder why they haven’t done it here. Having said that, battery life is one month on a charge. And I can confirm that I can go five to maybe six weeks between charges.
Incline adjustment is something else that’s missing from this keyboard. As in you can’t adjust the incline if this mostly flat keyboard doesn’t work for you. Now this keyboard as is happens to work for me, but it won’t work for everyone. I know that because I often get emails from people who buy desktop Macs and can’t cope with this keyboard. Thus they reach out to me for advice on what to replace it with. Now if you’re someone who doesn’t want to buy a new keyboard, and needs a bit more incline from their Magic Keyboard, this product might help you. I base that on feedback from clients who have tried this product and reported back that it helped to put the keyboard at an angle that works for them. But the fact that this product exists at all shows that maybe Apple needs to reconsider this design.
Finally, there’s this.
Why on God’s green Earth does this keyboard have a Lightning connector for connection and charging purposes? It’s 2024 and Apple should have moved this to USB-C by now. It’s not as if a USB-C connector wouldn’t fit in this keyboard. The bottom line is that this decision not to have USB-C on this keyboard is baffling to be honest. But on the flip side you get this:
Apple serves up a woven USB-C to Lightning cable in the box that’s colour matched. It’s a nice touch I suppose.
So this keyboard sucks right? Not so fast. A big plus to this keyboard is the inclusion of Touch ID. That’s handy for those who rely on Touch ID for anything from Apple Pay, to simply getting into your Mac, to using it for authentication purposes. There is a catch though. Touch ID only works with Apple Silicon Macs. If you have an Intel Mac, you’re out of luck. And in case you are wondering, no third party keyboard has Touch ID, likely because Apple won’t allow that for security reasons I am guessing. So if Touch ID matters to you, this is your only choice.
Sidebar: If you want to unlock your Mac and you own an Apple Watch, these instructions will help you to set that up. Which means that you won’t need Touch ID to unlock your Mac. Which by extension means that you may not need to buy this keyboard for that use case.
Another plus is the typing experience. I have to admit that despite the fact that I learned to type on a typewriter back when dinosaurs roamed the Earth, which in turn made me gravitate towards mechanical keyboards, the typing experience on this Magic Keyboard is quite good. Key travel is decent, it doesn’t take a whole lot of force to type on it, and it doesn’t make a whole lot of noise. I have no issues typing on it, likely because it mimics the experience of the built in MacBook Pro Magic Keyboard.
The looks this keyboard are another plus because it fits in with the Apple look and feel if that’s what you’re looking for. It also means that you will get a clean desk setup if that’s what you’re looking for. It also doesn’t take up a lot of real estate, and the build quality is very premium. Plus setting it up was laughably easy. I took it out of the box, turned it on, went to Bluetooth settings and clicked connect. Done. Have a nice day.
So, I have to come back to this question: Is this keyboard worth it? Well, if you care about Touch ID, or you want a keyboard that is fully within the Apple ecosystem. It might be worth it. If you want a very good typing experience that is similar to a MacBook Pro for example, it might be worth it. But the thing is that there are keyboards out there that cost less money that do most of what this keyboard is capable of. Which begs the question. Why do I have one? I am in the midst of redoing my desk setup and I wanted a wireless keyboard that occupies less space as I am now moving towards using my MacBook Pro in clamshell mode. So that combined with wanting Touch ID as some of the apps on my MacBook Pro use it made it worth it for me. But honestly, I had to really think long and hard about the “worth it” part before I took out my credit card to pay for this at the Apple Store. Or to put it another way, 95% of you reading this review shouldn’t buy this keyboard and instead you should look to options from companies like Logitech, Keychron, or Matias who are my go to recommendations for Mac keyboards. Chances are those keyboards are going to be worth it for the 95% of people who need a Mac keyboard as you get features like incline adjustment and backlighting which are strangely absent from Apple’s offering for way less money.
A Rather Bad iCloud #Scam Email Is Making The Rounds… And It Has A Twist To It
Posted in Commentary with tags Scam on May 4, 2024 by itnerdScammers are really not even trying anymore. I say that because for the second day in a row, I am writing about a scam where the scumbag scammer doesn’t seem to be putting in any effort into making the scam convincing enough that someone would fall for it. It starts with this email hitting your inbox:
If these scumbag scammers are trying to copy Apple’s look and feel, they’ve failed miserably. Assuming that this email which I am certain isn’t in the same star system as Apple’s in house branding guidelines doesn’t scream scam. This might:
That’s not an apple.com email address. Total #Fail. Besides those two things, I’ll point out that Apple lets you have 5GB of storage for free. After that, iCloud storage costs you money as evidenced by this link. So what the people behind this scam are trying to do is leverage the fact that the next jump in terms of storage capacity is 50GB, and that is normally a paid tier of storage that if you buy into the email is now supposedly “free”. Plus the added incentive for you to click through is that bad things will happen to you if you don’t do so. As in your files will get deleted. Which is false as Apple will never delete anything in an iCloud account. What will happen is that you will not be able to save anything into an iCloud account that is out of storage. But what’s already there will remain there.
I’m pretty sure that 99% of people who get this email will simply delete it. But as I have said numerous times, scams don’t have to be successful in volume to be successful. Thus let’s see what the 1% who click through see:
This fake iCloud website is only slightly more convincing than the email in terms of trying to copy Apple’s branding as well as their look and feel. And by the way, seeing as I haven’t logged into anything, how could this website know that my iCloud storage is full? It can’t which is further evidence that this is a scam. But let’s go down the rabbit hole. Clicking continue gets you this:
There’s this questionnaire that they want me to fill out. Why? What relevance does the following have to my iCloud storage:
Logically, Apple would already have this information if I logged into my iCloud account. Which I haven’t. Oh, by the way, this scam website makes reference to Apple’s “loyalty program”. News flash, Apple doesn’t have one. Then there’s the countdown clock to entice you to click through and do what the website wants you to do. Apple would never do that. Finally, if you look at the address bar, that’s not an Apple website as the address doesn’t end in “apple.com”. So yeah, this is still a scam. Anyway, the website once you answer these dumb questions will say you’ve qualified for the upgrade of your iCloud storage.
Yee haw.
Here’s what happens next:
You can already guess where this is going. The scumbags want to swipe your credit card details along with possibility your iCloud username and password. Let’s see if I am right:
So it appears that I am right about the fact that they want to swipe your iCloud credentials. Why I don’t know. But other than faking that this is a legitimate site, which they didn’t even try to do earlier on in this scam when they perhaps should have to make the scam more convincing, there doesn’t seem to any other reason that I can think of for this to exist. So I entered some bogus credentials into this site to get to this:
And here’s the part where the unwitting type in their credit card details so that these scammers can go to town at your expense. And look at the top right corner. This transaction is Verified By Visa and MaterCard. Sure it is. Anyway, the page has logic in it to verify the card number. Thus I wasn’t able to go past this screen. But you get the point.
In my opinion, this is a pretty unconvincing scam that maybe 1% of the population will fall for. But I guess that these guys are fine with a 1% success rate as that could be hundreds or thousands of dollars every time someone falls for it. I’ll be reporting this scam website to Google, Firefox and Microsoft which means that this website will have even less traffic.
Before I go, there’s one more thing. If you go to this site using Google Chrome (I used Firefox for the screenshots above), you get this:
Great, this is one of these scam websites that is going to be a pop up hell. And sure enough:
It seems I am correct. Just because I have nothing better to do, I will click on the McAfee one and see what happens:
It sent me to another website that pretended to scan my computer and it pretended to find all sorts of viruses. What’s hysterical about this is that it says that my phone is damaged by viruses. But I was running macOS inside a virtual machine when I did this. What losers. If I click “renew subscription” it kicks me to the real McAfee website via an affiliate link which would allow the scumbags behind this to make a few extra bucks. So in short, they are trying to get you in any way they can. Just to rain on their parade, I reported this website to Google and Microsoft as well so I can put an end to their fun. It’s the least that I can do to help keep the Internet safe from scumbag scammers.
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