By floating the device on a bed of magnets and plush felt, and inviting you to pull the iPad off its stand as needed, the Magic Keyboard somehow enables and rewards both stand-alone and paired use of the device. And the iPad Magic Keyboard highlights this brilliantly. It’s a slab too thin and light to be so powerful with so much battery life.
Make no bones about it, an iPad Pro is an enchanting object. So let’s start with that pairing: A superb keyboard coupled to budding but still-faulty software and work our way out to broader lands. This sense of a decline in software craft has been building for years, but it wasn’t until Apple released the iPad Magic Keyboard that I felt the pain of this hardware-software gap so acutely. Slower, less reliable software is like Penn Station: Sure, you can catch a transfer from one train to another but the dreary lowness of the place, the lack of sunlight or sensible wayfinding will make you feel like a rat, truculent and worthless, and worse: You’ll acclimate to that feeling and accept it as a norm. In the same way that physical architecture can affect a mind, so too can software.
A truth recently amplified by the COVID pandemic.Īnd I believe software used by millions (if not billions) has a moral duty to elevate the emotional and intellectual qualities of its users. Why should we care about this? Because the majority of our waking hours take place within the confines of applications.
But while the insidious “worseness” I mention falls only in part on the engineering side of things, it falls harder on the more subjective, craft side of things, making it all the more worrisome. We’ve never pushed more data between more places more readily. Objectively, we’ve never been able to do so much, so easily with our smartphones and laptops and tablets. It’s becoming more sluggish, less responsive, and subtly less reliable than it was a few years ago. Something strange is happening in the world of software: It’s slowly getting worse.
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