Keyboards

At 218 grams the $109.99 Samsung Smart Keyboard is over 288 grams lighter than Logitech’s MX Keys Mini but can also connect and switch between three Bluetooth devices. It’s powered by a CR2032 coin cell battery and includes shortcuts for accessing Bixby, Gemini, or Copilot when connected to a PC.

For employees at Insta360, that would be a very literal question. The Chinese camera company recently gave 21 staffers a bonus in the form of gold keycaps, the heaviest being the space key, which South China Morning Post reports weighs 35.02 grams and is valued at $45,000.

My colleague Antonio included several audio recordings of himself typing on various mechanical keyboards in his fall upgrades feature, and they’re delightfully therapeutic. Listen to this roundup below, or check out his article to listen to them individually.

That’s how much Atomic Keyboard is charging for its MDR Dasher keyboard, based on Apple TV’s Severance, though early adopters can save $300 with a $10 deposit. That gets you an aluminum keyboard with a trackball and swappable magnetic top sheet that enables three different layouts, depending on how show-accurate you feel like being.

Serene Industries is following up on its massive wedge-shaped Icebreaker keyboard with a smaller, lighter alternative called the Cleaver. Available for preorder now for $850 it’s also cheaper, but by no means cheap.

This would be a mildly funny April Fools’ Day gag if it were a fake product announcement. But CYL Any Keys is a real keycap set you can buy today. And it’s from GMK, so it’s a high-quality mildly funny April Fools’ Day gag, with doubleshot legends and support for mAny different keyboard layouts.

The $199.99 Mini Gen 3 is sporting the same Hall effect OmniPoint 3.0 key switches as the larger model that was released in September, allowing gamers to adjust actuation points from 4mm down to just 0.1mm. The TKL (tenkeyless) version of the Apex Pro Gen 3 is also now available in white for $219.99.

I’ve spent the past week typing on an early unit of the Norbauer Seneca, a mechanical keyboard that’s entirely custom, from its Topre-like electrocapacitive switches to its astonishingly smooth stabilizers. I also spoke at length with its creator about the process of making the board and why it’s so damn expensive. Stay tuned next week, feel free to ask about it in the comments, and meanwhile: just look at this keyboard.

The mute key’s label now features a speaker with a strike through it so it more closely resembles the icon that appears in macOS when pressed, as spotted by iCulture. Apple made the change on the new iPad Air’s Magic Keyboard, too.

Feeling nostalgic for the Game Boy’s glossy purple buttons? The Key Boy is a custom wireless keyboard, designed and built by YouTube’s The Lesser The Besser, that swaps traditional keycaps for 3D-printed recreations of the Game Boy’s controls, as spotted by Retro Dodo.

The Classic-GLO is an $89 glow-in-the-dark mechanical keyboard kit from Novelkeys. It’s just as fun to build and nice to type on as the Classic-TKL I tested and really liked last year, and now it glows in the dark. You know, just in case you need a little more joy on your desk. It comes in three colors, and I tried them all. Check it out:

The retrofuturistic computers used by Lumon employees in Severance are loosely based on the Data General Dasher terminals released in the late ‘70s. Signature Plastics, the same company responsible for the SA profile keycaps used on those terminals, is now selling a matching set of keycaps so you can upgrade your mechanical keyboard with Lumon aesthetics. The SA Macrodata Refinement set is available for preorder now for $197, and expected to ship in Q1 2025.

Art Lebedev’s expensive Optimus keyboards seemed like a footnote in tech blogging history until a small German company saw the potential for a new generation of content creators.

Mechanical keyboards were trending toward Hall effect switches, but at CES Epomaker is following recent announcements from Ducky and hyping induction as the next big thing.