Teardown of the Apple's A1243 Keyboard

Re:Teardown of the Apple's A1243 Keyboard by ascagnel_ on Friday February 12, 2021 @02:19PM (#26117431)

Apple has put out two versions of their tenkeyless keyboard -- one powered by AA batteries (and with a substantial battery hump to hold them), and a low-profile version with an internal battery that charges via Lightning. I had been using one of the latter for at least 5-6 years (before a key died, courtesy of something falling on the keyboard). I've had my current keyboard for about 4 months, and I haven't yet had to recharge it after the initial charge.

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Re:Teardown of the Apple's A1243 Keyboard by londons_explore on Friday February 12, 2021 @02:35PM (#26117623)

I would hope they can achieve a 50 year battery lifespan...

After all, in the life of a keyboard it probably types 10,000 characters per day for 50 years. Call that 400 Million events that need to be sent to your mac via bluetooth low energy.

The system can be entirely powered down when no key is pressed, so the only energy loss is a pre-keypress amount. That works out to about 3 Watt-hours (assuming each keypress is transmitted 3 times for interference-resistance and has a packet length the same as an advertisement). A long-life alkaline battery has a low enough leakage to last 50 years, and about the volume of an AA cell can easily power daily use for 50 years. If you want to go smaller and lighter, you could get 10 years out of a coin cell.

It would probably work out cheaper because you don't need to ship the device with a cable or charge circuitry too. Users don't have one more thing to worry about charging either.

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Re:Teardown of the Apple's A1243 Keyboard by lm28469 on Friday February 12, 2021 @03:25PM (#26118150)

> It would probably work out cheaper because you don't need to ship the device with a cable or charge circuitry too. Users don't have one more thing to worry about charging either.

Knowing Apple they'd probably solder or glue the battery so that you have even one less thing to worry about

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Re:Teardown of the Apple's A1243 Keyboard by johnwalkr on Friday February 12, 2021 @10:15PM (#26121083)

I’ve been using the original USB magic keyboard (same as in this link but without the number pad) and the original Bluetooth magic keyboard for about 12 years with no issues.

Just got an M1 MacBook and it’s so nice to have a pretty consistent feel compared to my other keyboards.

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Re:Teardown of the Apple's A1243 Keyboard by gumby on Friday February 12, 2021 @02:59PM (#26117898)

My gf and I each have a wireless keypadless AA-powereed apple keyboard, one of which takes two batteries and one of which takes three. I only know because I was using one and it ran low, and I discovered I had prepared the wrong number of batteries.

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