Magic Keyboard 2026

I’ve also been waiting years for them to fix their arrow key mistake on the compact TouchID keyboard. I had to deal with that silly arrow key layout on one of their laptops from the hardware bad times. Constantly slowed me down, never going back to that again.

I will only buy short (75 key) keyboards and Apple's refusal to get rid of the ugly dumb rounded corner keys and to put proper arrows on means I'm not buying any.

And anyway much prefer my Nuphy Air 75v2 keyboard which is compact and has proper arrow keys AND has screnshot/INS/DEL/page keys and Home/End keys, a perfect setup for a compact keyboard imo.

> On the full-size models with a numeric keypad, the change goes further, with the home, page up, page down, end, clear, and enter keys also swapping their text labels for symbols.

Any other changes besides this on the one with the numeric keypad? I need a new keyboard. i’ll buy the old one because i’d rather have text instead of symbols unless there is something other change that makes the new one better

The good news is that there's no shortage of fantastic keyboards, just as there's no shortage of fantastic mice.

Building your own fingerprint reader is a bit tricky, but absolutely doable
https://www.anildash.com/2026/08/20/introducing-dashboard-touch/

What exactly is the problem with the arrow keys having different sizes? I didn't even notice that the keyboard of my iMac and the MacBook Air have a slightly different layout.

I see that the ex-fn, now world, key is still located at the lower left corner next to the control key. This is a terrible idea considering how often the control key is used on a Mac compared to the fn key (*). As soon as you have multiple keyboards mapping configured, you frequently inadvertently switch to another mapping when you thought you were pushing the ctrl key (to display a contextual menu for instance) or you have the feeling that nothing is happening because you pushed the wrong key located at the right location.

The price of the black extended keyboard is still a joke.

(*) a long time ago, the fn key was useful to access some features. It hasn't been the case for a long time now.

@Kristoffer "The good news is that there's no shortage of fantastic keyboards"

Unfortunately, there are no other keyboards with touchID and as soon as you are required to use touchID to authenticate, you have to pay the Apple tax if you need an external keyboard.

The very rounded corners are… a choice. I wonder what the reasoning was behind it? Likewise, having a different arrow key layout for the external keyboards versus the inverted-T on their laptops.

[Sidenote: I regularly plug in my MacBook Air to a Microsoft Natural Ergonomic 4000 keyboard (soo comfy, I bought a spare one off eBay), but use the Air's keyboard for things like window management, Emoji selection and of course Touch ID. The best of both worlds!]

@Beatrix With the half-height arrow keys you can easily feel where you are.

@Spiffy I guess the corner radius is to match the Liquid Glass corners and other hardware like the iMac?

Honestly, I wish I could get a mechanical, low profile version of the pre-TouchID magic keyboard, with numpad. Every similar third party option I've seen, doesn't offer the full 19 F-keys, and I have everything above F12 mapped to macros / functions etc.

I'd be happy with the magic keyboard if it just had thicker, etched / replaceable keycaps, and a design that didn't allow dust into the workings. Normally I have a silicon skin over it, but it really seems to eat keystrokes.

@Someone And third-party keyboards tend not to fully support the fn key.

If the Magic Trackpad had a built-in Touch ID sensor, that would for sure push me over the edge to get one.

I don't understand why the left Command, Control, and Option keys are smaller than the right Command, Control, and Option keys. I almost exclusively use modifiers on the left side. The fn in the lower left corner I could do without since I almost never touch that key.

They should just move that fn somewhere else so the modifier keys are the same size on both sides of the keyboard or provide a configuration option for right handed people vs. left handed people. I think people who work the mouse with their right hand probably use their left hand to press modifier keys (for ex: control + click).

Also what's with this Context menu button (my old keyboard the fn key was actually in that spot)? And why when I press it does the context menu show up in a completely random location (as opposed to appearing directly underneath the Cursor)?

The small control key on the left side is really pissing me off because I keep missing it.

"On the new keyboards, the tab, caps lock, shift, return, and delete keycaps are labeled with glyphs rather than edge text."

Isn't that the way it's always been for Apple's European models? I never understood why their US models didn't do that. They used cryptic glyphs in menu items, and then expected their users to intuit the glyphname mappings somehow. I've been using Apple keyboards since the 1980's and it still confused me. At least open-Apple/closed-Apple icons made sense.

"Why, why, WHY won’t they fix the arrow keys?"

I find it funny what people will complain about. I've got a dozen issues with those keyboards but it would never occur to me that there's anything wrong with the arrow keys.

Apple keyboards still use offset rows, just like an 1872 Sholes and Glidden typewriter! Gotta leave room for those typebars, huh?

@mjtsai I admit, the only thing I use the fn key for is the (emoji) character viewer, which I activate by accident reaching for delete, more often than I actually want to invoke it.

@ObjC4Life perhaps the people at Apple now are too young to remember that the design of the Mac keyboard, is you rest your left thumb on the left command key, and all the common shortcuts are in an arc, pivoting your wrist around that thumb (as opposed to windows where it's your pinkie finger on control).

@Tim USian designed / supplied car stereos are also almost always labelled with english-language words, rather than glyphs, something that was remarked on in The Grand Tour, because the USian market takes it for granted the customer speaks English. European cars tend to use glyphs, because they sell into a market with 20 languages.

The FN key is handy if you've disabled the F keys and now need to activate a function, however non-Apple keyboards rarely have it, so you make up for it with other keys. On my Das Keyboard 4, F13 and F14 automatically become the brightness control, and media controls and the volume knob make up the other functions I normally need on Apple's F row. Great keyboards, BTW, but of course Touch ID has to be sacrificed. Use Apple Watch as an alternative.

>USian designed / supplied car stereos are also almost always labelled with english-language words, rather than glyphs, something that was remarked on in The Grand Tour, because the USian market takes it for granted the customer speaks English. European cars tend to use glyphs, because they sell into a market with 20 languages.

Yes, but the weird part is _the menu bar_ has always used the icons. So to me as a European, that made sense! When a menu item shows you a keyboard shortcut, you can look at the physical keyboard and see which keys you are supposed to press.

But that entire system doesn't really work when the key caps don't actually feature those icons, some of which are frankly a little esoteric.