The IT Nerd

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.

In late 2021 I bought my 16″ M1 Pro MacBook Pro. It corrected all the sins of Apple laptops since 2016. On top of that it has Apple Silicon which literally destroys any processor from Intel. It’s been my workhorse since then. Now while I did a review that comprised of Part 1 and Part 2 of this notebook, I decided that I should to circle back to it to give you an update in terms of how I have got on with it.

I’ll start with the bad first. I’ve had two keyboard replacements on it. The first was a year ago, and the second was a few weeks ago. Both times the repair was covered by AppleCare which illustrates why you should always get AppleCare. But if you’re not convinced, you can read this to give you a few other reasons to always get AppleCare. Now I am chalking these keyboard failures up to how I type rather than a defect in the computer, by that I mean the sort of issues that Apple had with the infamous “butterfly” keyboard, because the exact same key on the keyboard went bad both times. Thus I have changed my setup to hopefully keep a third time from happening. Specifically I now run the MacBook Pro in clamshell mode attached to a monitor and an external keyboard as opposed to how I was running before which was in this manner. By the way, I’ll be doing a desk setup article in the coming weeks once I have my new setup finalized. I should also note that both times that the MacBook Pro has been in for repair, Apple has had to replace other parts. Specifically a new trackpad which failed calibration during the second keyboard replacement, and a logic board (the motherboard in Apple speak) during the first keyboard replacement because whatever on the logic board that interfaced with the ambient light sensor failed. But there was an upshot to these repairs. To replace the keyboard, Apple has to replace the entire top case. That top case includes a battery as well as a keyboard. Thus I got a new battery with 100% battery health both times. That’s a win.

Now over to the good. And there’s lots there that is good:

• The 16″ mini LED display is still the best display available in a notebook short of going to something with an OLED display. The only display that it competes against is the super expensive Apple Pro Display XDR which doesn’t have ProMotion (variable refresh rates up to 120hz) capabilities, but has HDR capabilities like this 16″ display. In fact, if you run this in a multiple monitor setup, you’ll find it difficult to find an external display that matches the 16″display in terms of quality. Which is my challenge at the moment as once you get sight of this display, anything else is second rate.
• The speakers are incredible. I honestly have never thought of adding external speakers to my desk setup because the built in ones are so good. And combine that with the microphones which record audio so good that fools people into thinking that you’re wearing a headset or you have a pro quality microphone in front of you. That makes it really handy for a Teams call if you don’t have AirPods handy.
• The fact that Apple brought back all the ports that people use so that way you don’t have to live “the dongle life” is very much appreciated. For example, I use the built in HDMI port all the time to plug into projectors when I do presentations. The SD card slot allows me to pull photos off of my camera as well as update the maps for my car which reside on an SD card. The only dongle that I carry these days is a 2.5 Gbps ethernet to USB-C dongle as I often have to connect to things like enterprise routers and enterprise network switches to do things like firmware updates and to tweak their configurations.
• It’s still fast. Three years later I am still able to do exactly what I need it to do and it doesn’t feel any slower than it did on day one. What I often have to do is create virtual machines with different operating systems using VMWare Fusion so that I can replicate client environments to do anything from testing to troubleshooting. But to be completely honest, If I didn’t have to do that on a regular basis I likely would have gotten a MacBook Air or something like that as I would not have a use case for this computer.
• Though I will admit that this observation is affected by the fact that the battery has been replaced twice, battery life has never, ever been an issue for me. In fact, one of the few times I have taken the power adapter with me when I leave home is when my wife and I spent a week in France last summer. Bonus points for the fact that I can also use a third party USB-C charger to charge the MacBook Pro if I had to.
• The camera is “only” 1080p. But it’s far from trash. It’s actually pretty good due to the fact that Apple does all sorts of wizardry to make images look good.

The only other thing that I will mention is that my wife also got a 16″ MacBook Pro shortly after I got mine. She “only” got 16GB of RAM rather than 32GB. But it does exactly what she needs it to do. Which is Word and Excel along with Zoom and Teams. It is overkill for those needs, but at the time, this was the only way to get a large screen on a MacBook as the 15″ MacBook Air had not been announced. She runs hers in clamshell mode most of the time though only taking it out of the house on a handful of occasions, including our trip to France. And she’s had no issues with it at all. Both of us agree on one thing though, we don’t see a need to replace these MacBook Pros anytime soon. This despite the fact they are three years old, and we’ve tended to replace our Macs every three to four years in the past. The fact is that these MacBook Pros were a quantum leap above the Intel models that they replaced, and the M2 and M3 versions of these MacBook Pros are more iterative upgrades. Thus unless Apple comes out with something that is a quantum leap above these MacBook Pros, our incentive to upgrade is zero. In fact, we’re not the only people who feel this way. YouTuber MKBHD reviewed the 16″ M3 Max MacBook Pro when they first came out. But before he got the review unit from Apple as he’s one of the few people that Apple will send review units to, he ordered one fully maxed out. Then cancelled the order once the review unit arrived, and he did his testing for his review. The TL:DR is that he discovered that there wasn’t enough of a difference between the M1 Mac MacBook Pro that he has been using and the M3 Max model. And keep in mind that his job is to edit videos for YouTube and he shoots them in 4K. Which means he pushes his MacBook Pro way harder than most of us ever will. Here’s the video where he explains his reasoning. But it illustrates how good the M1 series of MacBook Pros were. And still are.

One final point. If you’re wanting to get into the Apple Silicon game and you want something more than a MacBook Air, Apple on their refurbished store in Canada and the US still sells the M1 Pro and M1 Max versions of the MacBook Pro with a decent price cut. Plus you can still get AppleCare for items bought from the refurbished store. So that is a great way to get a powerful computer and save some cash at the same time. Thus if you’re in the market for a MacBook Pro, I highly recommend that you go that route as this is a great computer which will likely fit your needs for a long time as my wife and I have discovered over the last three years. Make sure that you get AppleCare, and you’ll be happy.

There’s a bit of a story behind this Mac mini that I’ve been using for about two weeks now. Which is that I was planning on replacing a rather large PC that I had been using for the online cycling platform Zwift for some time with something a lot smaller and more efficient. But I was planning to hold out for the M3 Mac mini models that are sure to appear seeing as the M2 models have been out for over a year (Exactly 454 days as of the day that this review was posted). But what forced my hand was the fact that my 16″ MacBook Pro started to have keyboard issues. Again. Since I can’t afford to be without a computer as I have a business to run, this forced my hand into buying this Mac mini. Since I knew that it was possible that this could be replaced at any time by something faster, I went the route of buying it from the Apple Refurbished Store. That saved me $260 CDN and as I described here and it’s still eligible for AppleCare which I did buy as well. So once I had it in my hands, I transferred my data and applications to it from my MacBook Pro, took the MacBook Pro in for repair at The Apple Store and carried on running my business. Then when I got the MacBook Pro back (And for the record The Apple Store replaced a top case which includes the keyboard and battery along with a trackpad and got it back to me ten calendar days later), I moved my data back the MacBook Pro and factory reset the Mac mini so that I could repurpose it as my Zwift computer.

With the backstory out of the way, let’s start this review by describing which Mac mini I got:

• M2 Pro processor with a 10-Core CPU (6 performance cores and 4 efficiency cores) and a 16-Core GPU
• 16 GB RAM
• 512 GB Storage
• 16-core Neural Engine
• Four Thunderbolt 4 ports
• Two USB-A ports
• HDMI 2.1 port
• Gigabit Ethernet
• Headphone jack
• WiFi 6E
• Bluetooth 5.3

This is one of the higher end models as the Mac mini starts at $799 CDN. But for that price you get an M2 processor with 8GB of RAM and 256 GB of storage. To be frank, Apple’s base models are pretty useless because 8GB of RAM isn’t nearly enough for most people, and 256 GB of storage is slower than their higher tiers of storage on top of not being enough storage for most people. Which is why I skipped the base model (And you should too). Plus I wanted a more powerful processor for Zwift. Which is why I went to the M2 Pro and not the M2. I should also note that Apple has another version of this M2 Pro model that comes with 2 extra CPU cores and 3 extra GPU cores for $379 CDN more. But I didn’t see that on the refurbished store. Which is why I went with this one instead. Here’s a look at the Mac mini:

It’s a pretty small and light computer as the general design of the computer hasn’t changed since they introduced them in 2005. You could easily pop it into a backpack and take it with you if you wanted to and have space left over. It’s also a bit of a fingerprint magnet as you can see. That’s a side effect of the recycled aluminum that they use for the chassis. Though as you will see, the back end of the computer is just as much of a fingerprint magnet:

Here you see the gigabit ethernet jack, 4 Thunderbolt ports, the HDMI port, the two USB-A ports, and the oddly placed headphone jack which in my opinion should be on the front as it’s not all that accessible. Though you could also make an argument that it’s fine on the back because you’ll need to plug in a quality set of speakers into it as the built in speaker isn’t all that good to be frank. It has a decent sized vent, though in the two weeks that I’ve been using it, I’ve never felt any significant amounts air hot air coming out of it, nor have I heard the fans spin up. It’s been silent. I guess that also means that I clearly don’t push the computer hard enough. Speaking of pushing, this Mac mini moves very easily on your desk. As it slides about when you try to plug literally anything into it if you don’t hold it steady. It could use some rubber feet on the bottom to stop that from happening because if you plug a lot of stuff into this Mac, that will be something that will annoy you very quickly.

Now, another one of the reasons why I was sitting on the sidelines for the M3 models of the Mac mini is that on paper, the M2 processors really don’t have that much of a performance gain over the M1 processors. Though as you will also see, that’s an overly simplistic view of what the M2 is capable of. Let me illustrate that with some Geekbench tests. I’ll start with using my M1 MacBook Pro with these specs as a point of comparison:

• M1 Pro with 10-core CPU (8 performance cores and 2 efficiency cores), 16-core GPU, 16-core Neural Engine
• 1TB storage
• 32GB of RAM

As you can see they have the same amount of CPU and GPU cores, along with the same number of cores for the neural engine. Thus this is as fair of a comparison that you could possibly get. Let’s start with what the scores are for the M1 Pro CPU cores in my MacBook Pro:

And now, let’s look at the M2 Pro In my Mac mini:

The single core score is a bit higher. But the multi-core score is basically the same. Thus there’s no difference right? Well, not so fast. At first glance these scores would suggest that Apple didn’t spend a whole lot of time to make the CPU faster. But keep in mind that the M1 Pro has 8 performance cores and 2 efficiency cores. And the M2 Pro has 6 performance cores and 4 efficiency cores. That suggests to me that Apple made this M2 Pro more efficient by swapping two performance cores for two efficiency cores, and then tweaking all the cores to allow the CPU to put out the same level of compute power as the M1 Pro. Or to use a car analogy, Apple basically went from using a V6 engine that puts out 300 HP to a turbocharged 4 cylinder engine that consumes less gas and puts out 300 HP. Apple likely did this to save on power consumption for portable computer use without sacrificing speed. It also explains why the Mac mini did not “feel” any faster than my MacBook Pro when I used it to run my business.

Now let’s look at the Metal score. That’s important as Zwift uses Apple’s Metal graphics API to render graphics on the screen. Again, let’s start with the M1 Pro GPU in my MacBook Pro:

Now over to the M2 Pro in the Mac mini:

Now there’s a bit more of a difference. Clearly Apple invested some time to make the graphics a bit faster in the M2 Pro.

So if you take the GPU and CPU scores into account, and also take into account that there was no M1 Pro version of the Mac mini, that would suggest that this would be an upgrade path for someone with an M1 Mac mini who wants a faster Mac mini. Or this would be the computer to pick if you are coming to the Mac mini from a PC for example, and you wanted a small desktop computer that has healthy amounts of compute power. While at the same time not spending Mac Studio kind of money.

But the real question is, how does this run Zwift as that was the point of the whole exercise? Well, let me get something out of the way. Zwift on the Mac platform limits the level of detail of the graphics that the game displays for reasons that I don’t understand to what they term as “high” graphics detail which is their second highest tier of graphics quality (“Ultra” is the highest that you can go on the PC side of the fence which is visually sharper than “high”, but you have to look for the differences between the two. And you need some serious hardware to run Zwift at that level. As in an RTX 3090 for example). But they do let you run it at up to 4K resolution. So what I did was some frame rate tests at 4K and my results are as follows:

• The maximum frame rate that I recorded was 121 FPS
• The average frame rates were between 87 and 101 FPS based on recording the average frame rate over 10 different one hour rides.

In terms of what “high” graphics quality looks like on Zwift at 4K, here’s a couple of quick video clips where I set a couple of PR’s in a couple of sprint segments while I was doing a training session:

The graphic quality is good and there’s nothing to complain about here. But you have to wonder what you would get if you could unlock the “ultra” setting on a Mac. I say that because I was monitoring CPU and GPU performance and there was headroom to spare on both fronts. Which means that Zwift can look better than it does now if they chose to take advantage of the hardware on offer to the application. As for how that compares to the PC that I was replacing? Well, first of all, you can find the specs for the PC in question here, but average frame rates tended be between 59 – 66 FPS. And I’ve never recorded anything past 67 FPS as a maximum frame rate. All of that was on the “ultra” setting at 4K. If I throttled it back to “high” I likely would have gotten better frame rates. But I think you see the point here. Which is this tiny computer has enough power to run whatever you need, in my case Zwift, without breaking a sweat. And it can do it better than some PCs.

One final observation is that WiFi on this computer is faster than the WiFi that’s part of the M1 Pro chip. How Much faster? How about 150 Mbps upstream and downstream in testing on my WiFi network? That’s not a trivial amount. And keep in mind that I have WiFi 6 here in my condo. That means that you get a bit of an upgrade in terms of WiFi performance that you may actually notice depending on what WiFi hardware you own and what you’re doing. For example you won’t notice this streaming Netflix. But I tripped over this speed difference by doing a Time Machine backup and noticing that the backups went somewhat faster versus a Time Machine backup on my MacBook Pro with the M1 Pro. I attribute this speed increase in part to the fact that the M2 Pro’s WiFi support can do up to 2400 Mbps which is twice what the M1 Pro can do. And clearly that speed increase isn’t just a WiFi 6E thing.

Gripes? The only gripes that I have are the usual ones that I have about Apple computers. They are not cheap (Though to be fair, you could make an argument that the Mac mini has the performance of a 14″ or 16″ M2 Pro MacBook Pro at a lower price point). You can’t upgrade them after the purchase which forces you to perhaps buy more computer than you need in order to increase the longevity of said computer. And the base models suck performance wise which means nobody should ever buy them. Other than that, there’s really nothing negative that I have to say.

Let’s get down the price. This specific Mac mini variant is $1699 CDN. Though I paid $1439 via the Apple Refurbished Store, which is how I would suggest that you acquire one of these computers if you have a use case for it. I say that because I fully expect it to be replaced with an M3 model or even an M4 model at any time over the next few months. One thing to keep in mind is that the Mac mini doesn’t come with a keyboard or mouse, and you’ll need to source a monitor as well. So you’ll have to factor that into the purchase price if you don’t have a spare monitor, keyboard and mouse lying around. Having said all of that, this is a good way to get a desktop Mac and it’s worth a look if this Mac fits your needs. Just skip the base model.