Matias Wireless Aluminum Keyboard: The Apple Keyboard You’ve Been Looking For

After looking high and low, a wonderful commenter, George Canellis, put me on to the Matias Wireless Aluminum Keyboard. Thank you, George. Finally, after collecting a chest full of keyboards full of broken promise, this keyboard delivers.

And I cannot tell you how long I’ve been looking for this keyboard.  Apple, stubbornly, stupidly, will not make a wireless keyboard with a numeric keypad.  Why? Because they are stupid, stupid people.  But I digress.

John Kheit’s (partial) Keyboard Junk Drawer

The Good

If I had to guess, Matias found the company that makes Apple’s keyboards, because it feels and looks like an Apple keyboard.  The aluminum is the same grade of aluminum as an Apple keyboard.  Even the bottom is the same white lucite-like plastic.

It also has has the exact same keyboard layout as the Apple Wireless keyboard, and most the same layout as the Apple USB keyboard. Physically, the Matias keyboard really apes the physicality of the Apple USB keyboard—the USB port block propping up the Apple keyboard is instead a housing for a massive battery. That’s a great thing. No worries about remapping keys, and your muscle memory will transfer to this keyboard without any thought.

It has a rechargeable battery that lasts… wait for it… a whole FREAK’N YEAR! The base that angles the keyboard up seems to be all battery.  Sure Apple could have put in a bigger battery in their Magic Keyboard, but why would Apple bother to do anything you might find useful, like spend $0.50 more and put in a larger rechargeable battery in their devices.  They’re busy putting out un-ornamented Christmas trees, expensive picture books for overgrown children, and not updating Macs.  These are busy people.

The keyboard action and feel is very Apple-like, however, it is a touch stiffer than Apple’s Magic Keyboard. This may soften a bit with use, but be prepared to use a touch more force to hit the keys. But it’s really not bad at all. It’s about the same stiffness as the keyboards you might find in a 2011 MacBook Pro, so well within Apple-ish thresholds.

The keyboard also seems to instantly connect to the Mac as soon as you touch any of its keys. Many bluetooth keyboards, when they go to sleep to save battery life, become unresponsive with the first few keys you depress. Such keyboards, in effect, don’t register your first few key presses as they wake.  The Microsoft Surface keyboards suffer from this.  Other keyboards will take a while to wake, but will buffer your key presses and still eventually unleash what you typed—a lesser evil.  But Apple’s keyboards suffer no such delays, and happily, neither does this Matias.

Matias also offers the keyboard in different colors including: aluminum with white keys, a nice space grey with black keys, and aping Apple’s garish poor taste, in gold and rose gold (i.e., Hello Kitty® pink) as well.

Matias Wireless Aluminum Keyboards

The Meh

A little bit more on feel.  First, the keys have a more matte and/or course feel to them than the smooth Apple keys on its keyboards.  In addition, as you type, there is a soft reverb that goes through the keyboard, I mean really really soft.  I’ve had some people test it and not felt what I feel.  This seems to be an effect of the keyboard sitting atop 4 nice rubber feet. Depending on how sensitive your soul is, you might think this is a good thing, meh who cares thing, or bad thing—I personally fall into the ‘meh’ camp.

Also, this keyboard is a little taller than the current Magic Keyboard, and about the same height as the previous Apple Wireless Keyboard.  Depending on which generation of Apple Keyboard you liked, this may be a good or a bad thing, but I’ve personally grown to like the lower placement of Apple’s new Magic Keyboard.

The height is not the ‘meh’ thing, but rather, the Magic Touchpad now doesn’t perfectly line up with the keyboard. That said, it still looks decently at home next to this Matias keyboard.  But if Matias were to update the look of this keyboard to better ape the new Magic Keyboard dimensions, they would get another sale from me, no doubt.

You can see the Matias Keyboard behind the Magic Touchpad in the distant left of the photo, and its about the same height as the old Apple Wireless keyboard to its right.

Apple’s Magic Trackpad and the Matias Wireless Aluminum Keyboard

Next: More Meh, a Tiny Quibble, and My Conclusions

Page 2 – More Meh, a Tiny Quibble, and My Conclusions

The Matias keyboard in the photo below (bottom right) is a little longer than the wired Apple USB keyboard (top right), but is more compact width wise than the old Apple Wireless keyboard (left).

Apple’s Keyboards with the Matias Wireless Aluminum Keyboard

So I find this next feature to be ‘meh,’ but some people undoubtedly will see this as a big and good feature.  This keyboard let’s you pair with up to 4 different devices.

Pairing the Matias Wireless Aluminum Keyboard

I find this ‘meh’ because the only real use for an iPad is a great toilet companion, and it certainly doesn’t need a keyboard with a numeric keypad for my use case. Of course, your mileage may vary. I freely allow that others will disagree and will love to pair this keyboard with their iPhone, iPad, Macs, Android devices, Windows PCs, etc.  Personally, I would have preferred not to have the extra pairing keys. Instead, change the pairing keys to be extra function keys (F16-F19 as found on the wired Apple USB keyboard). Perhaps in a future revision, Matias could put 4 chiclet keys next to the chiclet on/off button on the back side of the keyboard, and in addition, give us back F16-F19 keys.

This is my being a bit greedy, but in addition to more function keys, I would have loved it if Matias made the Fn key work like a Caps Lock key. So when you hit the Fn key it would flip a little LED and toggle lock the F1-F15 keys. So if you want to go on a longer bout of function key use, you don’t have to press down the Fn key like a shift key every time you want to engage a function key.

The Matias uses a micro-USB connector instead of a lightening cable for recharging. The charging indicators are bit wonky. It takes 5 hours to fully charge it, and the Caps Lock key acts as a battery status having several different color LEDs: amber indicating the keyboard needs to be charged, or is charging; green is charged.

Matias Wireless Aluminum Keyboard Status Light

You can plug in the charging cable and still use the keyboard as it charges, which is nice. However, one nice thing about the Apple Magic Keyboard is not only can you use the keyboard while it’s plugged in and charging, it will work as a USB keyboard while plugged in—this is super nice if you’re ever doing some fancy reboots like purging PR RAM while booting.  The Matias keyboard will only work through its bluetooth connection, i.e., it will not work just as a plain wired USB keyboard while plugged in.

The Bad

My only negative quibble is the Matias keyboard does not show it’s current battery level under the Bluetooth menu like Apple devices do, instead, relying on its weird caps lock LEDs for battery charging status.

macOS Sierra Bluetooth Menu – Matias Wireless Keyboard

macOS Sierra Bluetooth Menu – Magic Trackpad

That said, since you only have to charge it once a year, it’s not really a big deal.

Some may quibble that it costs $99, the same as Apple’s Magic Keyboard, but as a value proposition, it spanks Apple’s offering. If you’ve been waiting for an Apple Wireless Keyboard with a numeric keypad, don’t. Hell will freeze over sooner than Apple starts actually listening to it’s customers. Instead, wait no longer, this is it: the Matias Wireless Aluminum Keyboard ($110.95 – Amazon, or $99 from Matias, plus shipping)

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