There’s few things in life less annoying than having to charge your Apple Wireless Keyboard or Magic Trackbad once or twice a year. In fact, on the annoyance scale, it’s well below other marginal annoyances like having to sharpen your pencil when it gets dull, or floss out a popcorn kernel after a night at the movies.
Still, if you’re willing to spend $60 on a gadget just to avoid life’s smallest and most inconsequential inconveniences, there’s the Mobee Magic Bar… an aluminum sleeve that plugs into your local USB slot and which will charge your Magic Trackpad or Wireless Keyboard’s battery through induction.
A pretty slick solution to a pretty mundane problem, no? Sadly, these won’t start shipping until the end of June, so you’ll have to wait… but then again, the chances of your keyboard batteries running down before then are pretty small anyway.
John Brownlee is a writer for Fast Company, and a contributing writer here at CoM. He has also written for Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, VentureBeat, and Gizmodo. He lives in Boston with his wife and two parakeets. You can follow him here on Twitter.
18 responses to “Mobee Magic Bar Will Spare You The Annoyance Of Twice Yearly Battery Swaps”
Magic Trackbad need to be changed to Magic Trackpad
At that point why wouldn’t you just have a wired keyboard?
The keyboard is still battery powered and wireless. You just connect the bar on occasion when you need to charge.
It’s the same concept as a wireless mouse and a charging cradle.
So you’re saying I will need a wired dock for my keyboard, which defeats the purpose of a wireless. Would you really take it out of the cradle and move it 12″ to the front of your desk? Silly.
Once or twice a year??? Try more like once a month. That said it is just as easy for me to pop in new batteries and pop the old ones into the recharger.
What’s your battery life secret? Though the keyboard lasts a while, I still have to charge the batteries every couple of months. The magic mouse (which I know you did not mention) has horrible battery life.
Are you speaking from actual experience??? I use my wireless keyboard about 8 to 10 hours per day, seven days per week … and never turn it off …. and I have to install new batteries about three times per year.
This article says nothing about the kind of batteries have to be used with this device.
For $60 I can buy 4 or 5 years worth of batteries…