Disassembly

As we noted before, the MK MAC BT uses screws on the front to keep everything together. Use a precision Phillips head driver to remove them, and note that you will have to remove many keycaps in order to access them all. Once done, the two primary pieces separate, but still have a few cables connecting them. One of these cables is glued in place; I found it easier to simply unscrew that daughter PCB off the ABS plastic bottom panel piece itself, followed by unplugging the other cables from their headers.


At this point, the bottom panel piece still has the daughter PCB that houses the female USB Type-C connector as well as the connectors and the battery itself. Both of these components have an insulating sheet above to prevent any shorting with the primary PCB right above. The battery is quite small for what it is, and it is in fact a bit too small for what should be 1200 mAh as mentioned throughout product pages everywhere. I took a look at the battery's sheath in more detail, and it turns out that the keyboard actually uses a 250 mAh battery instead! I then contacted AZIO about this and they in turn contacted their manufacturing partners and confirmed it. At this point, I insisted that everything be updated as soon as possible to reflect the correct battery specification and, to their credit, AZIO agreed knowing this meant they also had to update manuals and packaging and perhaps recall existing inventory. As of the date of this article, AZIO has already updated the product page to reflect this. This is still a real issue in that customers have been led to believe they were getting a keyboard with a battery that is nearly five times as strong as the actual one. Be it a lack of clarification on the battery manufacturer's part, poor quality control and testing from AZIO in not verifying this until I brought it up, or just a language barrier somewhere in their production channel, this should not have happened at all. The rest of the keyboard is thankfully sans drama. We have a primary PCB that is blue in color and has a lustrous finish, and solder quality is excellent with straight connections where needed and no solder peaks or excess flux anywhere.


The other daughter PCB, the one that was unscrewed off the ABS panel earlier, houses the on/off switch and pairing buttons. The microcontroller used is a Broadcom BCM20730 that is also sold as the Cypress Semiconductor CYW20730. This is a Bluetooth 3.0-complaint transceiver with an integrated 2.4 GHz transceiver, so it answers the question as to whether the keyboard is Bluetooth Low Energy compliant or not (and it is not) while also revealing that AZIO could have gone with a 2.4 GHz connection as well. Not the best component choice or implementation here, but let us not judge until all the testing is done. As per usual, all the components are on a multi-layered PCB.

Before moving on, be advised that disassembly will void the warranty and that TechPowerUp is not liable for any damages incurred if you decide to go ahead and do so anyway.