atonaldenim

Thanks for making us aware of this product! It sounds like the author is not in the niche club of iPad Mini owners desperate for something, anything that resembles this. As the price is currently only $56 with STUDY15 promo code on Lululook's site, I just ordered myself a Gray one to go with my iPad Mini 6 in Starlight. (the keyboard comes in gray or black.)

This looks to be the same keyboard under a different brand name that YouTuber "VeryLastDollar" called "The BEST PREMIUM iPad Mini 6 Keyboard Case" and "The Must Have Keyboard Case For Any iPad Mini 6" which he reviewed at $80. Yes the video is goofy but he's one of the only people I've found that reviews and compares the various mediocre iPad Mini 6 keyboards that are available on the market. He raves about this keyboard and trackpad compared to the other options available. 

I got the Brydge Mini 7.9" keyboard for my previous-gen iPad Mini and I LOVE that size device for a tiny travel laptop. Having a physical keyboard makes the on-screen keyboard disappear, making the screen real estate feel twice as large in some instances. But one of the big drawbacks of the Brydge was the clamps that pinch the bezels to stay mounted to the iPad. When folding the iPad + keyboard combo shut, pressing on the top rear of the iPad (as one normally closes a laptop) caused the iPad to flex in the Brydge's clamps, so the clamps put undue force on the front of the iPad as it folds down. You can see the screen change colors frighteningly from the pressure points of the hinge clamps. The best solution I found was to flip it over so the iPad itself rests on the table and the keyboard is up in the air, and then press on the back of the keyboard to fold it down against the iPad. Not ideal and hard to get in the habit of remembering to do it this way. 

In comparison the magnetic attachment of this Lululook keyboard looks like it will be far more gentle to my new iPad Mini. And a trackpad, so exciting! Unlike the author, I'm not a writer, and so I expect to use the trackpad for web browsing a lot more often than the keyboard. And it will hopefully be a nice travel combo that I can also use to hold the iPad screen in various positions for watching videos etc.

Before the iPad Mini 6 was even available for sale, I wrote Brydge immediately after the Mini 6 was announced, begging them to produce a keyboard with trackpad like this for the new iPad Mini. Over a year later, the old Brydge Mini 7.9" keyboard is discontinued and it's still crickets from them if they'll ever release a new Mini keyboard option, let alone with a trackpad. This Lululook keyboard's nice magnetic cradle solves the old Brydge's hinge pinch problem, and the USB-C charging port is an improvement on the Brydge's micro-USB port as well. I'm not expecting it to be as good as the iPad Magic Keyboard, but I've given up hope anything that good will ever exist for the iPad Mini 6. For about 1/5th the price of a Magic Keyboard, I'm hoping this little keyboard case will be a decent travel companion for my iPad Mini in situations when a full size laptop is too big and too valuable to carry.

Wow, this would have been a dream card for my Mac Pro 5,1s four years ago when I was still putting money into them. I currently have all 3 of those cards filling up all my PCIe slots - 10GbE, USB 3.2, NVMe. Although the Sonnet’s x8 PCIe connection would limit the bandwidth on the MP 5,1’s PCIe 2.0 bus.

It was definitely not designed for the old old Mac Pro but rather as a budget option for single-slot Thunderbolt enclosures to upgrade Mac Minis etc without taking up all their TB ports, and for PCs with few PCIe slots available. On the PC side this could give new life to a lot of older machines that don’t have Thunderbolt ports for a TB dock. Like the old HP mini tower I tinkered with turning into a TrueNAS 10GbE server. Really cool combination of useful upgrades in one card for a pretty reasonable price actually! I only wish they’d given it a x16 PCIe connection for maximum speed with older PCIe 2.0 machines.

I appreciate that the Satechi X3 has the Fn key in the same place as the full-size Apple keyboards do. What I don't appreciate is how they replaced the Exposé and Launchpad shortcuts on F3 and F4 with App Switcher and Spotlight. I already instinctively use the Cmd+Tab and Cmd+Space shortcuts for those functions, I would never reach up to F4 to switch between apps. I missed the Exposé shortcut and there doesn’t seem to be any easy way to remap the shortcut keys on the Satechi. I think the Spotlight shortcut key literally sends Cmd+Space to the OS. 

I bought the Satechi X3 but I had to return it because it didn’t work well with older Macs. On my Mac Pro 2012 I was not able to see or pair it over bluetooth, probably because it only has BT2.1. (It may be possible to upgrade an older Mac with a newer Bluetooth USB dongle, I didn’t try that.)

I maybe could have lived with that if it worked well in wired mode, however the Satechi X3 was not recognized by the Mac Pro at all until after the OS had finished loading. So I couldn’t hold down the Option key to choose a boot disk on startup, for example, which is something I do often. Or reset the PRAM, or enter Recovery Mode, or any other startup keyboard shortcuts.

When booted into Mac OS High Sierra with the X3 in wired mode, the OS said it didn’t recognize the keyboard layout and I had to type a few keys to correctly identify the keyboard. After that it worked fine.

Also the backlight bleed around the edges of the keys was much brighter than the actual key label that’s supposed to be the thing that’s lit up. I also didn’t love the squishier key feel compared to my wired silver and white Apple keyboard. I did have some instances of repeated or missed letters. And the X3 had slightly larger and more spread out keys which felt a little less natural for my smallish hands.

The incompatibility with older Macs was the main reason I had to return mine. On the other hand I got a used (discontinued) space gray Magic Keyboard which does work perfectly with my Mac Pro 2012, and solves all those other problems too. Although it lacks the multi-device and backlight features, it’s fundamentally a better Mac keyboard. Too bad, I wanted to like the Satechi. On first impression its build quality is very good and Apple-like.

Eric_WVGG said:

lkrupp said:

Sorry, not going to happen except in the wet dreams of techies stuck in paradigms of the past.

Alright, but…

- there will be a new Mac Pro
- there is no reason for the Mac Pro to exist beyond expansion cards
- the only expansion cards anyone cares about are GPUs
- Thunderbolt is just external PCIe; if AMD GPUs are ever supported on Apple Silicon, they WILL work on eGPUs
- why would Apple go through all this work just for their best-of-the-best computers to remain second fiddle

I think it’s 50:50. The more confusing question IMO is why the Mac Pro persists at all.

Well said. After the super high performance Mac Studio Ultra, what else is left for the Mac Pro to offer besides crazy highest-end expansion potential?

Apple knew full well that M1 was coming when they started designing the current Mac Pro in 2018. At that time, neither the existing Mac Pro nor any other Mac offered PCIe slots for customer expansion. I don't think they would have brought back customer-facing PCIe slots in late 2019, with a whole new proprietary slot and cooling system design, only to take the slots away again in the next model.

They could have made the Mac Studio in 2019, called it the new Mac Pro, it would have been the natural successor to the 2013 Mac Pro, and nobody would have been surprised at all. It could have been like the iMac Pro spec-wise with no upgradeable parts, and that would have made a very smooth transition to M1 in just a few years.

But instead in 2019 they re-positioned the Mac Pro from being a mostly sealed appliance à la the 2013 Mac Pro, back to being a PC-like tower with a bunch of PCIe slots and almost fully interchangeable parts. I really don't think they would have made such a dramatic shift in product design if they weren't planning to continue going in that direction after the looming M1 transition. The whole story about the 2019 Mac Pro was "we hear you" and "we are committed to this market" and a lot of that market is doing VFX, 3D rendering, things that demand the highest possible GPU power.

Given that they are already on the hook for supporting AMD GPUs on Intel MacOS until the 2019 Mac Pro is deemed "obsolete" late this decade or next, I think they can spare the resources to support AMD GPUs on Apple Silicon Macs also, given the premium prices they charge for those products. I'm less convinced they have any motivation to support eGPUs for consumer/prosumer level products, but we shall see. It's possible that the Mac Pro CPUs won't be branded "M1" and will have some extra secret sauce that enables AMD GPU support, that all other M1 Macs won't have. Perhaps Apple will be able to produce their own GPUs that beat any AMD config imaginable. I kinda doubt that, but that should be a fine solution too if that's their answer to GPU performance. But I do think that it's a hard requirement for a new Mac Pro to offer faster GPU performance than the last one. For the very very niche market that product is aimed at, it just has to.

I completely agree that it seems most likely that Apple Silicon Mac Pro will re-introduce AMD GPU support. 

The reason for the Mac Pro’s existence is to offer totally mind-blowing capabilities at the highest possible tiers of performance. Money is no object, and neither is power consumption. The Mac Pro in its current form has to be WAY more powerful than both the current Intel Mac Pro and the next best M1 Mac, the Mac Studio, or else it can’t justify its existence. Mac Pro is not for consumers or prosumers - they are already covered with the current M1 lineup. None of Apple’s Mac Pro customers want to see the Mac Pro change from the familiar, supported, stable Intel + AMD architecture unless Apple Silicon offers them dramatic, undeniable benefits.

The rumored 40-core dual-M1 Ultra CPU seems like it ticks that box on the CPU front, that should offer way better performance than the current Xeons. But on the GPU front, 128-core dual M1 Ultra GPUs would be pretty good, but definitely not equivalent or superior than the current Mac Pro’s highest possible GPU configs - two W6800X Duo MPX modules (4 GPUs!) or two W6900X GPUs. Two M1 Ultra GPUs might match one W6900X, but it wouldn’t beat TWO W6900X or FOUR W6800X. The new Mac Pro GPU story has to be at least as good, if not significantly better than what’s already available in the Intel Mac Pro.

It’s possible Apple might have a trick up their sleeve with a “Lifuka” proprietary GPU that offers the mind-melting performance the current M1 Ultra GPU doesn’t quite offer. But given all the work Apple put into designing the MPX module system in 2018 and the ridiculously over-engineered MPX-sized Mac Pro chassis, when they knew M1 was right around the corner, I’d bet the GPU story will be that Mac Pro customers can recoup their investment in expensive MPX GPUs and simply move them into their new Apple Silicon Mac Pros. They’ll get to enjoy their current level of highest-end GPU power plus the added benefit of the built-in Afterburner encoders/decoders of M1 Ultra, and the 128-core dual M1 Ultra GPU augmenting the AMD MPX GPU. It’ll be like getting an additional W6900X worth of GPU power “for free.” And surely the base level Mac Pro configs will be fine with the M1 Ultra’s GPU alone, but I think they simply need to keep offering the MPX expansion option for those who truly need to max out GPU power. (As well as likely adding an expandable RAM option to match the current Pro’s 1.5TB capacity.)

And yes, if that happens then eGPU support for the rest of us would be great too! Although I do wonder if Apple’s less robust Thunderbolt implementation on M1 is entirely up to the task…