I now have visions of an Apple Extended Extended Keyboard that comes with a crank...

It’s nothing new. In fact, many of the comments on this site were made by keyboards with cranks.

Er… I meant to say cranks with keyboards. Sorry. It was a rough weekend.

Not even an ADB-to-USB dongle?

Thirty years ago, Apple made a translucent green ADB "keypad" which had a small LCD display (perhaps only two lines of text?) – marketed towards academics, it allowed students to learn touch-typing without the distractions of an entire computer.

Once you were happy with your touch-typed document, you then plugged the "keypad" directly into your Mac's ADB (keyboard/mouse) port... and the thing would sit there and manually re-type your composition into the computer's texteditor.

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Education needs such "reduced tech" to return to teaching. Think of this one as a "more advanced typewriter" – although I own a few of those, too, and they're fantastic for pure composition.

The real question is does the power button on the AEK still work on iOS?

You have to also hold down `ctrl` [+power], but yes.