Hardware details Manufacturer: Satechi

Compatibility: Mac OS X and Windows

Price: $34.99

Links: Official website | Amazon Satechi: Mac OS X and Windows: $34.99

If you were to take a walk through the Ars Orbiting HQ, you would hear the click-clack of many a IBM Model M keyboard and its ilk. Senior Reviews Editor Lee Hutchinson finds the “crisp break of the spring” addictive. Me? I like how the Apple keyboard feels—I have the truncated Bluetooth model and I find it a pleasure to type on. There’s one drawback, though: the lack of a numeric keypad.

In a perfect world, Apple would offer a wireless keyboard with built-in numeric keypad, but if you want to exercise your mad 10-key skillz on an Apple keyboard, you’ll have to do it with wires.

Having a white USB cable running along the top of my desk to the back of my iMac would upset my delicate aesthetic sensibilities, so I’ve gone with the wireless keyboard/Magic Trackpad combo. But my job requires me to spend an occasional shift in the Excel salt mines, and I find that to be a much more pleasant experience with a dedicated numeric keypad. After some searching, I purchased a Satechi Wireless Smart Keypad to make spreadsheets less of a drag.

The Satechi Wireless Smart Keypad has been imbued with the Apple design aesthetic. It’s the same color and shape as the Apple keyboard, but it's made from plastic instead of aluminum. It’s an inch deeper than the keyboard and 1.25 inches narrower than the trackpad.

There’s a reason for the size mismatch: the Satechi Keypad also functions as a standalone calculator, so it has a 12-digit LCD screen across the top along with two rows of dedicated calculator keys.

Setup and pairing is simple. After inserting the two provided AAA batteries into the battery compartment via the latch on the bottom, I turned it on, selected Mac from the “Mac/PC” toggle switch, pressed the “Comm” button on the underside, and it paired with my iMac in the same manner as any other keyboard.

Once turned on, you can leave the power switch in the “on” position and the keypad will sleep when it's not needed; to wake it, simply press the “wake ce/ac” button. There’s a small “mode” button at the right of the top row of calculator buttons that will switch the device between calculator and keypad modes and it works well: my iMac invariably recognizes it as an input device within a split second of switching from calculator mode.

As a basic calculator, it gets the job done. As a numeric keypad, it works extremely well. The layout is slightly different than the numeric keypad on the Apple Extended Keyboard, with the equals function performed by the enter key and a backspace key in the top row, but the tactile sensation and key return is similar to that of Apple’s keyboards.

At $35.99, there are less-expensive alternatives than the Satechi Wireless Smart Keypad, but I find the built-in calculator function to be very useful and I like the fact that it matches the rest of the computer hardware on my desktop. If you find yourself longing for a numeric keypad that can act as a standalone calculator, you could do a lot worse than the Satechi.