I know Apple marketing is great but we need to have a little chat about the Magic Keyboard because I think they may have sold you a lie. You see, despite it being pretty great the keyboard Apple sold you isn’t really magic.

I am not sure what you expected to happen when you attached a keyboard complete with backlight keys and a trackpad to an iPad but it was never going to turn it into a Mac. The way that some people have spoken about the keyboard seems that they expected some kind of OTA update once you connected it, and that the iPad all of sudden wasn’t an iPad anymore.

Yet here we are debating everything negative about a device that isn’t supposed to do what you want it to. While the comparisons to the surface are somewhat valid, to say that Windows tablets do it better is simply not true. Windows tablets are laptops stuffed into a tablet form fact and made to work — whereas the iPad is the reverse. It’s pretending to be a Laptop, but its not pretending to be a Mac.

I can’t help but think that if the iPad was made by someone else we wouldn’t even be making these comparisons to a Mac, and indeed that some of the evangelical aspects of iOS would be removed. As this eloquent tweet storm points out there are some points that feel like you have to agree to an iPad philosophy. That in order to really ‘get’ the iPad you have to devote your life to praising its positives and shift your whole workflow in order to use it Working on iOS feels like a badge of honour that people wear, and become strangely evangelical at every point.

The fact remains. Are you making the iPad a worse tablet because you attach a Magic Keyboard. Of course you are. You’re attaching a keyboard that effectively turns the iPad into a laptop and some how that is surprising? Yet you can remove the tablet easily and use it as a tablet once again. If your expecting a keyboard that is lighter and can remain on when you want to use it as a tablet — good news Apple sell that kind of keyboard too.

As the old saying goes a “Jack of all trades is a master of none”. Attaching a keyboard to the iPad does not make it a master Laptop, better options exist. Attaching a Pencil does not make it a master drawing tablet, better options exist. Plugging the iPad into an exerting display… you get the idea. The iPad cannot be all things to all people. But its doing a bloody good job of giving people a tablet when they want it. Turning into a sudo-laptop when they want it, and also being capable of ridiculously powerful tasks when you need them.