We had the fun today of tearing down the new iPad Air's Smart Cover to find out where it keeps it's magnets (we wanted to get our Magkey working with the new iPad Air).

We could have torn down the iPad Air itself but that's a much more time consuming proposition so buh-bye Smart Cover.

Well it turns out Apple has updated the Smart Cover to bring it inline with the iPad Mini's Smart Cover; it now has two reversed polarity magnets that interact with the hall effect sensors on the tablet to trigger the cover lock/unlock feature.

The old Smart Cover for the iPad 2/3/4 used only a single magnet to control the sleep function. We suspect apple switched to two magnets with alternating polarities to prevent accidental sleeping of iPads, or perhaps they have some other clever ideas up their sleeve that they are keeping under wraps for now.

The new magnet placement poses some challenges in how we adapt the Magkey to work with the new iPad Air but we have some ideas ;-)

It does mean that all those case vendors that rushed their magnet-enhanced cases onto the market won't work with the iPad Air, ah well live and learn.

See photo showing location below.