Author: azeeadmin

The Australia government has said it will adopt a mandatory code to require tech giants such as Google and Facebook to pay local media for reusing their content. The requirement for them to share ad revenue with domestic publishers was reported earlier by Reuters.

Treasurer Josh Frydenberg published an opinion article in The Australian Friday — writing that an earlier plan to create a voluntary code by November this year to govern the relationship between digital platforms and media businesses — in order to “protect consumers, improve transparency and address the power imbalance between the parties” — had failed owing to “insufficient progress”.

“On the fundamental issue of payment for content, which the code was seeking to resolve, there was no meaningful progress and, in the words of the ACCC [Australia’s competition commission], “no expectation of any even being made”,” he wrote.

The ACCC has been tasked with devising the code which Frydenberg said will include provisions related to value exchange and revenue sharing; transparency of ranking algorithms; access to user data; presentation of news content; and penalties and sanctions for non-compliance.

“The intention is to have a draft code of conduct released for comment by the end of July and legislated shortly thereafter,” he added. “It is only fair that the search engines and social media giants pay for the original news content that they use to drive traffic to their sites.”

The debate around compensation for tech giants’ reuse of (and indirect monetization of) others’ editorial content — by displaying snippets of news stories on their platforms and aggregation services — is not a new one, though the coronavirus crisis has likely dialled up publisher pressure on policymakers as advertiser marketing budgets nose-dive globally and media companies stare down the barrel of a revenue crunch.

Earlier this month France’s competition watchdog ordered Google to negotiate in good faith with local media firms to pay for reusing their content.

The move followed a national law last year to transpose a pan-EU copyright reform that’s intended to extend rights to news snippets. However instead of paying French publishers for reusing their content Google stopped displaying content that’s covered by the law in local search and Google News.

France’s competition watchdog said it believes the unilateral move constitutes an abuse of a dominant market position — taking the step of applying an interim order to force Google to the negotiating table while it continues to investigate.

Frydenberg’s article references the French move, as well as pointing back to a 2014 attempt by Spain which also created legislation seeking to make Google to pay for snippets of news reused in its News aggregator product. In the latter case Google simply pulled the plug on its News service in the market — which it remains closed in Spain to this day…

“We are under no illusions as to the difficulty and complexity of implementing a mandatory code to govern the relationship between the digital platforms and the news media businesses. However, there is a need to take this issue head-on,” Frydenberg goes on. “We are not seeking to protect traditional media companies from the rigour of competition or technological disruption.

“Rather, to create a level playing field where market power is not misused, companies get a fair go and there is appropriate compensation for the production of original news content.”

Reached for comment on the Australian government’s plan, a Google spokesperson sent us this statement:

We’ve worked for many years to be a collaborative partner to the news industry, helping them grow their businesses through ads and subscription services and increase audiences by driving valuable traffic. Since February, we have engaged with more than 25 Australian publishers to get their input on a voluntary code and worked to the timetable and process set out by the ACCC. We have sought to work constructively with industry, the ACCC and Government to develop a Code of Conduct, and we will continue to do so in the revised process set out by the Government today.

Google continues to argue that it provides ample value to news publishers by directing traffic to their websites, where they can monetize it via ads and/or subscription conversions, saying that in 2018 alone it sent in excess of 2BN clicks to Australian news publishers from Australian users.

It also points out publishers can choose whether or not they wish their content to appear in Google search results. Though, in France, it’s worth noting the competition watchdog took the view that Google declaring that it won’t not pay to display any news could put some publishers at a disadvantage vs others.

The dominance of Google’s search engine certainly looks to be a key component for such interventions, along with Facebook’s grip on digital attention spans.

On this, Frydenberg’s articles cites a report by the country’s competition commission which found more than 98 per cent of online searches on mobile devices in Australia are with Google. While Facebook was found to have some 17M local users who connected to its platform for at least half an hour a day. (Australia’s total population is around 25M.)

“For every $100 spent by advertisers in Australia on online advertising, excluding classifieds, $47 goes to Google, $24 to Facebook and $29 to other participants,” Frydenberg also wrote, noting that the local online ad market is worth around $9BN per year — growing more than 8x since 2005.

Reached for comment on the government plan for a mandatory code for reuse of news content, Facebook sent us the following statement — attributed to Will Easton, MD, Facebook Australia and New Zealand:

We’re disappointed by the Government’s announcement, especially as we’ve worked hard to meet their agreed deadline. COVID-19 has impacted every business and industry across the country, including publishers, which is why we announced a new, global investment to support news organisations at a time when advertising revenue is declining. We believe that strong innovation and more transparency around the distribution of news content is critical to building a sustainable news ecosystem. We’ve invested millions of dollars locally to support Australian publishers through content arrangements, partnerships and training for the industry and hope the code will protect the interests of millions of Australians and small businesses that use our services every day.

If enough countries pursue a competition-flavored legislative fix against Google and Facebook to try to extract rents for media publishers it may be more difficult for them to dodge some form of payment for reusing news content. Though the adtech giants still hold other levers they could pull to increase their charges on publishers.

Indeed, their duel role — involved in both the distribution, discovery and monetization of online content and ads, controlling massive ad networks as well as applying algorithms to create content hierarchies to service ads alongside — has attracted additional antitrust scrutiny in certain markets.

After launching a market study of Google and Facebook’s ad platforms last July, the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) raised concerns in an interim report in December — kicking off a consultation on a range of potential inventions from breaking up the platform giants to limiting their ability to set self-serving defaults and enforcing data sharing and/or feature interoperability to help rivals compete.

Per its initial findings, the CMA said there were “reasonable grounds” for suspecting serious impediments to competition in the online platforms and digital advertising market. However the regulator has so far favored making recommendations to government, to feed a planned “comprehensive regulatory framework” to govern the behaviour of online platforms, rather than taking it upon itself to intervene directly.

Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between.

Late last week a Chinese company called Kingsoft Cloud filed to go public in the United States. The cloud infrastructure business intends to list on the Nasdaq under the symbol “KC,” with J.P. Morgan, UBS and Credit Suisse helping out with running the deal.

Kingsoft Cloud has a $100 million placeholder figure in its F-1 filing, giving us an idea of its expectations for the size of the public offering. According to Crunchbase data, Kingsoft Cloud raised nearly $1 billion while private.

There are a few questions to answer:

1. Does Kingsoft compete with Alibaba’s cloud projects that the Chinese tech giant just promised to spend $28 billion building out?
2.  Is it an economically viable business?
3. What are we supposed to think about an IPO in this economy?

What does Kingsoft Cloud do?

The best founders seek out great mentors and guidance from folks who know best, but during the coronavirus pandemic, asking for help when it’s needed is critical for all entrepreneurs.

Ureeka, a startup founded by Melissa Bradley, David Jakubowski and Rob Gatto, is looking to provide that mentorship and guidance through their platform, which just closed on an $8.6 million funding round from Bullpen Capital, Chicago Ventures and Salesforce Ventures.

“There is an intentionality in our business to go after what we see as the fastest growing, largest and most interesting market opportunity, which is not the Harvard and MIT pedigree, but underrepresented entrepreneurs,” said Bradley. “Small and medium businesses account for 99 percent of all business in this country and there has been a real missed opportunity around serving them.”

The company says that female led venture-backed business performance is 63 percent higher than investments in all male teams, while the same businesses have 12 percent higher revenue and use 33 percent less capital, with a 15-25 percent lower failure rate. Since the recent recessions, businesses owned by people of color are the fastest growing segment, with 38 percent growth between 2008 and 2012, according to Ureeka. Meanwhile, Hispanic-owned businesses have seen 46 percent growth from 2007 to 2012, with $700 billion in sales globally, creating 8 million jobs with a total payroll of $254 billion, the startup says.

Ureeka pairs these entrepreneurs with mentors and coaches to get answers to their most pressing questions. The idea for the startup came when the cofounders were judging a pitch competition in Michigan and got to talking about the challenges associated with starting a company, particularly for underrepresented founders.

The Ureeka founders noted that black, hispanic and women founders begin businesses with approximately half of the capital that white men do, on average, and that loan rejection is three times higher for minority entrepreneurs than their white counterparts.

“In talking with Melissa, I realized that there are some basic things I was taking for granted,” said Jakubowski, formerly Head of Data & Analytics, Emerging Business & Partnerships at Facebook . “For example, I could pick up the phone and have an answer to my question in 30 minutes.”

After testing for months, Jakubowski and Bradley (Managing Director of Project 500, adjunct professor at Georgetown’s Business school and presidential appointee under both President Clinton and President Obama) launched Ureeka to give access to mentorship to underrepresented small and medium business owners, agnostic of sector or region.

These entrepreneurs can hop on the platform with a question and get an answer from a mentor or coach in under two hours. Mentors, experts from just about any sector of business, give their time to the platform for free. Coaches, on the other hand, are paid contractors (many of whom have their own business or operational position at a large company). Ureeka members can also start up conversations with other members, and access on-demand webinar-style content on topics that are common to the whole community, such as adapting to the coronavirus pandemic.

Ureeka has more than 200 mentors on the platform, many of whom hail from companies like Facebook, Snap, Salesforce, Google, and Adobe, among others. Ureeka members can also pay a premium ($3,000/year) to have access to a dedicated coach, who can then follow along with the various questions and issues that arise and ultimately skip over the exposition and context-gathering part of the conversation. Those that opt for a dedicated coach get two hours each month of one-to-one video chat with their coach.

Alongside the funding announcement, Ureeka is also announcing that it will be facilitating the SMB grant programs from Facebook and Salesforce. Facebook’s grant program will provide $100 million to SMBs in the United States, and Salesforce’s Small Business Grants will provide $10,000 individually to SMBs.

According to the company, Ureeka members see 2x revenue growth once they’re connected to mentors and coaches, and the founders noted that many Ureeka members graduate to mentors or coaches and pay it forward to new members.

The for-profit business charges $200/year for members to join, and the company takes less than 15 percent margin. Ureeka is also waiving its fee for all businesses impacted by coronavirus through 2020.

The company also has a vendor partnership program, helping members find the right vendor for their need without being overwhelmed by thousands of Google search results. In fact, many vendors are Ureeka members themselves, creating a virtuous circle within the Ureeka community. Big corporations that would like to be included in the Ureeka vendor program must provide a dedicated line of communication for the Ureeka community.

Twins have long played a role in the world of medical research, specifically in the area of clinical trials, where they can help measure the effectiveness of a therapy by applying a control to one of a genetically-similar pair. Today, a startup founded by a former principal scientist at Pfizer, which has developed a way of digitising this concept through the use of AI, is announcing some funding to further its efforts. Unlearn.AI, which has built a machine learning platform that builds “digital twin” profiles of patients that become the controls in clinical trials — is announcing that it has raised $12 million in a Series A round.

The round is being led by 8VC with previous investors DCVC, DCVC Bio and Mubadala Capital Ventures also participating.

The startup’s DiGenesis platform is first being applied to neurological diseases, specifically Alzheimer’s Disease and Multiple Sclerosis, where effective treatment options remain an elusive goal and it has been hard to build clinical trials around patients with already-impacted health.

Although Unlearn.AI is not working on anything close to medicines related to the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s a timely reminder of why improving clinical trials is important. We’re now in an urgent race to find vaccines and treatments for this new virus, and that highlights the need for more efficient approaches to trials, and that is an area where AI could prove to be a boost.

Unlearn does not disclose who its commercial partners are today, nor how far they’ve come with rolling out active, live trials. The funding will be used to inch closer to that point, it seems.

“This new financing marks an important milestone in our growth and will contribute to the significant progress we are making with regulators and with our commercial partners, who are already running studies with Digital Twins and demonstrating their value in generating robust evidence and increasing the potential for trial success,” said Charles K. Fisher, Ph.D., founder and CEO of Unlearn.AI, in a statement.

“Clinical trials are facing a number of persistent challenges that have only been exacerbated in recent weeks. With support from our forward-thinking investors and industry partners, we are excited to continue growing our exceptional team and advancing the science behind our first-of-its-kind Digital Twin approach.”

Fisher’s background is one that falls squarely at the nexus of technology and medical research. In addition to time spent as a principal scientist at pharma giant Pfizer, he has also worked at Leap Motion, and those roles followed years of studying and researching biophysics in academia.

Unlearn approaches the idea of building these so-called digital twins as a classic machine learning problem, using “clinical trial datasets from thousands of patients to build the disease-specific machine learning models used to create Digital Twins and their corresponding virtual medical records.”

These are more than simple medical profiles: they match people according to demographics, lab tests and biomarkers. The idea is that by building AI-based twins, there is less of a need to find similar actual pairs of people — actual twins, even — to run tests and controls.

Unlearn has been working on its platform since 2017, but the use of twins (and the pair’s very close genetic makeups in medical research) to track pathology and treatments goes back decades, and interestingly one of the novel coronavirus tracking apps that has seen some strong traction was borne out of a long-term twins study run out of Kings College Hospital in London working with Stanford and Massachusetts General Hospital in the US.

The growth of using AI to build “people” to run the effects of drugs also follows a much bigger theme of using computers and algorithms to test and create chemical combinations and therapies that would have in the past taken much longer, and cost much more, to run out manually. (Another example of where this is being applied is in the world of product development, where consumer goods companies are using AI platforms to formulate new soaps and other goods.)

“Unlearn’s pioneering use of Digital Twins will limit the number of patients that need to go on placebo while also reducing overall trial enrollment time,” said 8VC Principal, Dr Francisco Gimenez, in a statement. “As investors at the intersection of healthcare and technology, we’re passionate about companies that pair cutting-edge computational techniques and innovative business models to meaningfully improve patient care. 8VC is excited to partner with Unlearn to bring about the biggest change in the drug approval process since the RCT.” Gimenez is joining the board of the startup with this round.

Uber is introducing two new types of services, the company announced this week, including Uber Direct and Uber Connect. Direct is a delivery platform for retail items, while Connect is a peer-to-peer package delivery service, for sending goods to family and friends. This marks the most aggressive foray yet for Uber into courier services, after it already introduced grocery items to its Uber Eats platform as the coronavirus pandemic continues to suppress its ride-hailing business.

Uber has already also introduced new extensions of its platform for transporting personal protective equipment to front-line workers, and Eats is also delivering convenience items in some markets in addition to grocery goods. The Direct and Connect services will likewise open in select cities initially, and the service looks very different depending on where it’s in use. IN NYC, for instance, it’s delivering over-the-counter medications in partnership with Cabinet, whereas in Portugal it’s essentially supplementing the public postal service with general mail parcel delivery.

Uber Connect provides same-day, on-contact delivery from one person to another, which Uber positions as a way for people to send care packages, supplies, games and other quarantine daily staples with their friends and family. It’s launching in over 25 cities across Australia, Mexico and the U.S. to start. At heart, Connect isn’t much different from Uber’s basic rider service, but instead of transporting people door-to-door, it’s moving stuff.

Both of these are being introduced today but will evolve over time as Uber sees how usage proceeds, and what people want out of the service. Stepping up on the goods delivery front should also mean bolstering utilization rates for drivers, and continued income in the face of massive decreases in demand for general rider transportation services, even as Uber Eats sees a big usage spike as more people seek direct-to-door food delivery.

Uber is introducing two new types of services, the company announced this week, including Uber Direct and Uber Connect. Direct is a delivery platform for retail items, while Connect is a peer-to-peer package delivery service, for sending goods to family and friends. This marks the most aggressive foray yet for Uber into courier services, after it already introduced grocery items to its Uber Eats platform as the coronavirus pandemic continues to suppress its ride-hailing business.

Uber has already also introduced new extensions of its platform for transporting personal protective equipment to front-line workers, and Eats is also delivering convenience items in some markets in addition to grocery goods. The Direct and Connect services will likewise open in select cities initially, and the service looks very different depending on where it’s in use. IN NYC, for instance, it’s delivering over-the-counter medications in partnership with Cabinet, whereas in Portugal it’s essentially supplementing the public postal service with general mail parcel delivery.

Uber Connect provides same-day, on-contact delivery from one person to another, which Uber positions as a way for people to send care packages, supplies, games and other quarantine daily staples with their friends and family. It’s launching in over 25 cities across Australia, Mexico and the U.S. to start. At heart, Connect isn’t much different from Uber’s basic rider service, but instead of transporting people door-to-door, it’s moving stuff.

Both of these are being introduced today but will evolve over time as Uber sees how usage proceeds, and what people want out of the service. Stepping up on the goods delivery front should also mean bolstering utilization rates for drivers, and continued income in the face of massive decreases in demand for general rider transportation services, even as Uber Eats sees a big usage spike as more people seek direct-to-door food delivery.

Facebook’s dedicated Gaming app is now live on Android, months before its planned June release. The social media giant pushed the app out two months prior to its scheduled unveiling amid a global pandemic that’s left people all over the world isolated at home, rapidly burning through entertainment options.

The New York Times announced the upcoming release in an exclusive over the weekend, noting that Facebook’s massive gaming investment has culminated in more 700 million of the sites’s 2.5 billion users actively playing games through the platform monthly. The launch of a devoted app is a clear next step for content that has, until now, been the domain of the site’s Gaming tab.

Social engagement is the focus for the app (naturally), which will be getting an iOS version at some point in the near future (pending Apple approval). “It’s entertainment that’s not just a form of passive consumption but entertainment that is interactive and brings people together,” the app’s head Fidji Simo told the paper, later adding, “We’re seeing a big rise in gaming during quarantine.”

Twitch and YouTube are among the biggest competitors for the app’s gaming Go Live streaming feature. Facebook has already has a massive platform in its own Live offering, which is currently seeing high levels of use as isolated users seek some manner of human connection during the COVID-19 shutdown. With Go Live, users can share gaming streams directly to their Facebook page.

Live streaming is the highlighted feature upon launching the app, while a second tab offers game discovery both through your friends’ activities and a by category breakdown. A final tab sports a chat platform.

The app’s arrival comes after a year and a half of testing in various markets, including Latin America and Southeast Asia. Gaming is launching without ad support, though Facebook tells the Times that it plans to monetize by taking commission off of “stars” — donations viewers send to streamers.

It remains to be seen how the Twitch/YouTube method will translate for a platform traditionally more focused on casual gaming titles like Words With Friends. Not all of the service’s attempts to spin off features as devoted apps have been successful, but the rushed timing could give the service an extra boost, as users seek out new forms of content and socializing during a global shutdown. 

Good morning and welcome back to TechCrunch’s Equity Monday, a brief jumpstart for your week. Regular Equity episodes still drop each and every Friday morning, so if you’ve listened to the show over the years, don’t worry — we’re only adding. In fact, last week’s show (with Danny Crichton and Natasha Mascarenhas) was a blast, and you should check it out.

This morning, however, we had a lot to get through, so let’s go over the show’s rundown:

• Changes are afoot in Israel regarding employee comp and startup valuations.
• The UK is coming to the aid of its startups at a notable cost.
• Alibaba is dropping serious coin on new cloud infra, reminding us that there’s more to the world than Washington state.
• Alan, a French insurtech startup, has raised $54.4 million.
• It’s earnings week, with a number of major tech companies joining other large American companies in reporting results. Q1 2020 is whatever. What everyone wants to know is how bad the rest of the year is going to be.

And, finally, Marc’s latest essay. I should probably write about it more broadly, but as we said this morning: “Aspirational construction of the future is a concept that many people associate with America,” and demanding that we harken back to our halcyon days is no sin. That said, we’ll need to do work as a country to set the groundwork needed to make an explosion in entrepreneurship and building possible — like providing healthcare to all citizens so that folks can quit their jobs without losing care, making room for new businesses to rise.

Still, it’s good for Marc to get hyped up and mad at our current state, and he has the money to do something about it. So, let’s see what he does about it.

When I was 10 years old, my dad took me to Fenway Park for the first time. I remember quite clearly walking up the runway and seeing the brilliant green lawn and being totally and completely amazed. Now that’s a great customer experience.

I was hooked simply by the beauty of the ballpark, even before watching these talented men flip the ball effortlessly around the diamond during infield practice, before the first pitch, the crack of the bat, the roar of the crowd. The sounds, the sights, the hot dogs and drinks were all part of it — and I was in love with that experience from the moment I saw that emerald lawn.

Stadium sports has always been about the experience. “Buy me some peanuts and Cracker Jack, I don’t care if I ever get back….” That has only increased in the days of mascots and dancers and massive high definition scoreboards.

But sports suddenly face an existential crisis in 2020. If we can get back to the point of playing games again, yet there are no fans in the seats, how do the leagues reproduce the excitement of being there at home through the use of advanced technology? As every business is forced to rethink the meaning of customer experience during a pandemic, maybe sports could show the way. “And it’s root, root, root for the home team….”

This week we’ll get our first taste of how that could work as the NFL Draft goes virtual. It had previously been scheduled to be a three-day, fan-driven Las Vegas spectacle. The stage was going to be set up on the water in front of the Bellagio Hotel, and players were to be taken there by boat as they were drafted. All of that carefully-crafted pageantry is gone, and it will instead be delivered by technology in COVID-19 isolation.

In the short term, it would be unfair to look at the draft as the ultimate exercise in going virtual. It is the first, and chances are it will not be flawless, but like every business, from conventions to universities to retailers, suddenly just about every experience possibility is on the table, and it will be interesting to see how they do it.

It’s not just the first round spectacle that is changing due to the virus; the way teams work together has changed as well, just as it has for many businesses in the last 6 weeks. They have to figure out ways to recreate the “draft war room” when all of the key players can’t be in the same room together. Sound familiar?

If and when games resume, the way we watch live sports will probably change as well. How will all sports build off the NFL’s first attempt? How will they create community and generate excitement without a live audience to drive the mood?

Chances are we will see changes big and small. Spitballing some ideas, there could be live interactive communities in which the players participate with fans. There could be wider use of microphoned players and coaches on and off the field as we get a look behind the curtain. The possibilities are endless, and you can be sure there are many discussions going on across every sport, pro and college, about how this could work.

They could turn to virtual reality or augment the experience in other ways like advanced replays, creative camera views or putting the fan virtually on the field, ideas that have been on the table or been slowly implemented in recent years, some of which we saw in the recent, short-lived XFL. We already have advanced stats with brilliant visuals from AWS-sports league partnerships. All of these ideas and more are suddenly being forced to accelerate much faster.

However these experiences manifest themselves, we are about to find out just how creative the leagues can be. Perhaps we’ll find new ways to experience life outside the ballpark in our homes that give us a different, but no less exciting, experience. Maybe some 10-year-old kid will still feel that same thrill I felt, but learn in a different way “...if they don’t win it’s a shame, and it’s one, two, three strikes you’re out at the [new] ballgame.”

Over the past two years, I’ve typed nearly every word I’ve written while traveling on the iPad Pro’s Smart Keyboard Folio. For more on why you can see my iPad Pro review here.

For the purposes of this look at the new Magic Keyboard, though, you should probably just know two things:

1. It was reliable, incredibly durable and never once failed me.
2. It kind of stunk in every other way.

The Keyboard Folio’s plastic coated surface made it impervious to spills, but it also made the keys much less responsive. It rendered them unable to give your fingers the feedback necessary to confirm that a key had been struck, leading me to adopt a technique where I just hit every key with maximum strength at all times.

The new Magic Keyboard is as different from that device as the new MacBook Pro keyboards are from the low profile ones that dominated headlines over the last couple of years. It’s a huge jump forward in usability for the iPad Pro — and for last year’s model too.

I am very relieved I don’t have to slam my fingers onto the plastic keyboard anymore, because over long and fast typing sessions I could feel a numbness that would begin to radiate from the tips of my fingers a bit. An enervation of sorts. It wasn’t precisely painful but it was noticeable.

The Magic Keyboard offers a lovely, backlit deck that holds its own against the 16” MacBook Pro and the new MacBook Air for best portable keyboards. The key travel is excellent — in between the two laptops in my opinion — and the feel is tight, responsive and precise. This is a first class typing experience, full stop.

I’ve been testing the three keyboards alongside one another for the past few days and I can’t stress enough how stable the keys are. Even the MacBook Air allows a tiny bit of key shift if you touch your finger to it and gently circle it — though the MacBook Pro is better. There’s such a small amount of that here that it’s almost imperceptible.

It’s a tad spongier than the 16” MBP but more firm than the MacBook Air, which has a bit more return and travel. In my opinion, this keyboard is ‘louder’ (due to the plastic casing being more resonant than the aluminum), than the 16” MBP, but about the same as the MacBook Air. The throw feels similar to the 16” though, with the Air being slightly deeper but ‘sloppier’.

So a hybrid between those two keyboards as far as feel goes, but a clear descendant of the work that was done to turn those offerings around.

Construction

Among my biggest concerns was that Apple would get overly clever with the hinge design, making the the typing an exercise in wobble. Happy to say here that they took the clear path here and made it as sturdy as possible, even if that was at the cost of variability.

The hinge is a simple limit stop design that opens far less than you’d expect and then allows a second hinge to engage to open in an arc between the 80 and 130 degrees. The 90 degree and fully open positions basically mimic the angles that were offered by the grooves of the Keyboard Folio — but now you can choose any in-between position that feels natural to you.

Apple has obviously put this hard stop fold out limit in place to maintain balance on tables and laps, and its clever use of counter opposing forces with the second hinge combines to limit tipping and to make typing on a lap finally a completely viable thing to do. The fact that you don’t have to hammer the keyboard to type also makes this a better proposition.

For typing, these positions should be just fine for the vast majority of users. And the solid (very high friction) hinge means that the whole thing is very sturdy feeling, even with more moving parts. I have been quite comfortable grabbing the whole assembly of the 12.9” iPad Pro plus Magic Keyboard by the deck of the keyboard and carrying it around, much in the way I’d carry a laptop. No worries about accidental floppiness or detachment.

At the same time, the new design that floats the iPad in the air allows you to quickly pop it off with little effort by either your left or right hand. This makes the Magic Keyboard take on the use case of a desktop based dock, something that never felt right with the Keyboard Folio.

The touchpad physically moves here, and is not a haptic pad, but it is clickable across its entire surface. It’s also a laptop-class trackpad, proving that Apple’s engineering teams still have a better idea about how to make a trackpad that works crisply and as expected than any other hardware team out there.

I do love the soft touch coating of the case itself, but I believe it will wear in a similar fashion to these kinds of surfaces on other devices. It will likely develop shiny spots on either side of the trackpad on the hand rest areas.

The responsive half arrow keys are extremely welcome.

Some other details, quirks and limits

The camera placement situation is much improved here, as you’re less likely to hold the left side of the iPad to keep it stable. The lift of the keyboard (at times about an inch and a bit) means that the eye line, while still not ideal, is improved for zoom calls and the like. Less double chin up the nose action. Apple should still move the iPad Pro’s camera on future versions.

The keyboard’s backlight brightness is decent and adjustable in the settings pane once it’s attached to iPad Pro. The unit did use more battery in my tests, though I haven’t had it long enough to assign any numbers to it. I did notice during a recent Facetime call that the battery was draining faster than it could charge, but that is so far anecdotal and I haven’t had the time to reproduce it in testing.

This is not the case that artists have been waiting for. This case does not rotate around backwards like the keyboard folio, meaning that you’re going to be popping it off the case if you’re going to draw on it at all. In some ways the ease of removal feels like an Apple concession. ‘Hey, we couldn’t fit all this in and a way to position it at a drawing angle, so we made it really easy to get it loose.’ It works, but I hope that more magic happens between now and the next iteration to find a way to serve both typing and drawing in one protected configuration.

A little quirk: when it’s tilted super far back to the full stop I sometimes nick the bottom edge of the iPad with my fingers when hitting numbers — could be my typing form or bigger hands but I thought it worth mentioning.

It’s a bit heavy. At 700g for the 12.9” keyboard, it more than doubles the weight of the whole package. The larger iPad Pro and keyboard is basically the weight of a MacBook Air. Get the 11” if weight is a concern.

The fact that this keyboard works on the older iPad Pro (the camera just floats inside the cutout) means that this is a fantastic upgrade for existing users. It really makes the device feel like it got a huge upgrade without having to buy a new core unit, which fits with Apple’s modular approach to iPad Pro and also stands out as pretty rare in a world where the coolest new features are often hardware related and new device limited.

At $300 and $350 for each size of Magic Keyboard, the price is something you must think about up front. Given that it is now easily the best keyboard available for these devices I think you need to consider it a part of the package price of the device. If you can’t swing that, consider another option — it’s that good.

If you work seriously with the iPad and that work is based on typing, the Magic Keyboard is essentially mandatory. It’s the dream keyboard for all of us who found ourselves crossing the Rubicon into iPad as primary computer over the past couple of years. It’s not without its caveats, but it is a refreshingly straightforward and well executed accessory that makes even older iPads feel like better laptops than laptops.