Thinking of buying a mechanical keyboard and have you asked a friend which one you should buy? Most likely, she told him: buy yourself a Key chron. By now it's already a meme. After making a name for itself with affordable mechanical keyboards (with a focus on Mac users), the company now offers keyboards for all budgets and with practically all layouts, from the 9% Q40 to the 6% Q100, passing through all intermediate models. And while the Q line gets a lot of press, the more affordable and pre-built K and V lines target the non-hobbyist market.
At this point, Keychron has much of the potential market covered, so it's starting to offer some more exotic designs. The last of them is the Q10, a 75% Alice board with a few twists. Not surprisingly, it's also an easy recommendation for anyone looking for this type of board.
Like keyboard at 75%, the robust Q10 (it weighs a little less than two kilos), with its aluminum body, offers function keys, number row, and dedicated keys for insert, delete, page up/down, and home. As you'd expect from a modern keyboard, it has hot-swap connectors so you can easily try new switches and a controller on the left side. And because there's a little more space here, Keychron has added five macro buttons below the knob that can be assigned to whatever you want, using what has now become the industry standard VIA app. Like most modern keyboards, it'll work perfectly with Mac or Windows, but there's no wireless option (although it's coming to Keychron's Q lineup soon, starting with the upcoming Q1 Pro). Oh, and there's per-key RGB, too, if that's your thing.
It is, of course, a keyboard with Alice layout, that is, the keys are not in a straight line, but the left and right halves are slightly tilted, which, according to some, allows for more ergonomic typing. It's easy enough to get used to, even for touch typists, and quite comfortable for typing.
Otherwise, The Keychron follows its standard configuration: gasket mounting for a bit of flex and silicone gaskets between the top and bottom shells to reduce ping and other noise..
Una nice thing Keychron is doing now with their latest board is to pre-modify it. A popular hack among enthusiasts is the tape mod, for example, which involves sticking some painter's tape to the bottom of the PCB to absorb some of the higher frequencies when typing. On their new boards, Keychron already applies masking tape to the bottom of the PCB itself.
