Production Update: The Boards Are Real

Posted in September, dated to the week it describes. The shipping estimate at the end was later missed. The September update has the current window.

The second round of sample boards arrived on 18 July and I've spent the week since living with them. This is the board we'll put into production, and the first one I've been happy to photograph. In the two keyboard photos below, the May sample is on top and the July sample is underneath.

Lights off, backlight on. May sample on top, July sample below.

The keycaps

Most of the change between the two boards is in the keycaps, and they took the longest to get right.

We chose PBT over ABS early on. ABS goes shiny and slightly oily after a few months of heavy use, and PBT keeps its texture. The legends are dye-sublimated, which means the white is dyed into the plastic rather than printed on top of it. There is nothing to wear off. It also lets us use our own mono font and our own legends without the cost of custom moulds, which matters when you are a small company iterating on a layout.

The trade-off we accepted was backlighting. Dye-sub PBT is opaque, so the legends don't shine through. Shine-through PBT needs custom double-shot moulding, which is expensive at our scale, and the off-the-shelf shine-through sets we tried looked soft in daylight, which is when most people actually use a keyboard. We decided we'd rather have crisp legends in the day and accept a glow around the keys at night.

Then the July samples arrived and the legends lit up. Same thickness of cap, same process. I pulled a cap off the May board and put it on the July board, and it glowed faintly there too. The effect follows the board, not the cap: the switches on the new board have a small diffuser over the LED that spreads the light much more evenly under the cap, and our legends sit at the top of the key, right above the LED. Enough light gets through the plastic to read the legend in the dark without turning it into a lightbox. We didn't design for it, and we're keeping it.

The caps are also thicker than the first round. You can see the wall in the photo below.

Underside of a July keycap.

Switches

The board now ships with Gateron Brown G Pro 3.0 switches. We started with reds. In May three of us sat down with both prototypes and two older Keychrons and typed on all four for a morning. The browns were quieter than we expected, noticeably quieter than the browns in a six-year-old Keychron, and they give a light tactile bump that reds don't. For a board that will mostly be typed on rather than gamed on, that bump is useful. The board is hot-swappable, so if you'd rather have reds you can change them.

The build

The July board is heavier and stiffer than the May one. It sits at around 890 g against our 900 g target, and there's no flex in the plate when you press on it. Most of the extra time between rounds went into the firmware, and into small changes so the board can be serviced. The whole assembly lifts out of the case once the screws are out, and the battery connects with a single cable, so a battery swap years from now is a ten-minute job rather than a replacement keyboard.

Daylight. Same two boards, backlight on full.

Warranty and the wrist rest

Two things for everyone who pre-ordered and has waited through the delays:

• Every keyboard now comes with a one-year warranty. We've been building out the support and returns side to back that up.
• Every pre-order gets our walnut wood wrist rest, free, in the box with the board.

Where things stand

I'm finishing the quality check on these two boards now. Once I sign off, the factory starts the production run, which takes roughly four to five weeks end to end, so boards should start heading out from late August. That's later than the July we quoted earlier, and I'm sorry for the wait. You'll get tracking the moment your board ships.

I'll post again once the production run is underway.

Kish