Teardowns

Teardown Is Served—Apple Smart Keyboard

The countdown to Thanksgiving has begun, and we’re celebrating a wee bit early by carving up Apple’s final offering of the season—the Smart Keyboard.

The iPad Pro accessories are making Apple history—the first official iPad stylus, and now the first official iPad keyboard. We’ve seen inside an iPad Smart Cover and several Apple keyboards—but we never expected the twain would meet. As the Smart Keyboard is completely glued together and covered in fabric, we pretty well knew the score going in—but what would we find inside? By the time we finished carving, our turkey of a teardown served up loads of layers and some fun fabrics. Take a look!

Smart Keyboard teardownSmart Keyboard teardown highlights:

• After cutting and prying our way inside, we get a peek at the high-tech synthetic fabrics holding things together and defending against water and stains.

Smart Keyboard teardown

• Further in we find conductive fibers that bring power to the keyboard and send its keystrokes back to the iPad.

Smart Keyboard teardown

• A huge PCB spans the keyboard, home to 64 of the same sort of switch found in the 2015 MacBook.

Smart keyboard teardown

This is just a sampler of the whole teardown. You can find more pictures and analysis here.