Keyboard on a iPad

When I had the stupid idea of using a Bluetooth mac keyboard on an iPad mini 2 running iOS 12, I honestly had no idea if it’d work. I knew mouse and keyboard support was added somewhat recently with the whole thing about iPadOS moving to be more like MacOS, but I didn’t know when. Android has supported it is since basically forever it seems because of OTG support, but Apple never had an equivalent easily accessible feature until the iPad Pro had a usb-c port. So I got out my Bluetooth keyboard from 2007 and had a go at connecting it.

It took a couple tries at connecting, but I was already impressed when it prompted me to type the numbers on the screen to confirm it was the correct keyboard. After that, it worked immediately.

I opened up a new note and started typing. iOS knew the keyboard was connected and didn’t open the on-screen keyboard, instead adding a small bar on the bottom similar to the top bar on the normal keyboard with the spell check and stuff. In Notes it also had options for drawing and formatting. Safari also recognises common mac keyboard shortcuts such as Ctrl-tab for changing tabs. Function keys function as they are labelled with keys adjusting brightness and volume all working.

One thing I was impressed with was that cmd-tab cycles through open apps like it would a mac. Another thing was that the eject key (yeah, I forgot apple keyboards had those too) toggles the on-screen keyboard. Finally, holding cmd for a little bit brings up a pop up showing the current app’s available keyboard shortcuts.

The typing experience on the keyboard itself is a wonderful experience. There’s the perfect amount of tactileness and the base is solid. The arrow keys are a little mushy, though that could be how small they are, or the age of this keyboard.

This post is a little weird since iOS 13 added support for mice and full support for keyboards, this is mostly outdated now. But it was certainly a fun experience typing all this out on the keyboard. I definitely would not recommend the iPad mini 2 as a weird portable computer thing since it can’t updated past iOS 12. If you really want this setup, the iPad mini 4 is past 9 years old as time of writing so it should be cheap, but it’s also stuck at iOS 15. A much better option would be the iPad mini 5th gen from about 5 years ago, which is still getting the latest updates. However, both still use the lightning port, so Bluetooth is the easiest way to connect peripherals, unless you find a lightning to USB adapter.