Keychron K2 Max QMK Wireless Mechanical Keyboard

The keyboard looks, sounds feels great, and overall is decent for the price. But it definitely is expensive enough to be bothered by some nitpicks. It's probably more like 3.5 stars, half a star off for each nitpick, but there are no half stars and I don't think it's quite four stars.

Price: $179 for keyboard + $29 for palm rest + $13 shipping = $221 AUD total. The cost of the accessory which I think is necessary to make it comfortable, and no free shipping from within Australia for a small package at this price, leaves a bit of a bad taste in my mouth. I don't think it's ridiculously priced for the market but at $221 I definitely can't ignore the nitpicks.

Nitpicks:

1. Backlight doesn't shine through letters on keycaps like standard K2 models, which I did not realise. I'm sure there is a reason for that, being the "Max" version, and perhaps people who customise their keyboard will appreciate it. But with dark keycaps and no shine through there is barely any point to having a backlight at all. I really like the shape and feel of the keycaps.

2. Spacebar is slightly loose, with a slight click on the left side before the switch begins to be pressed. I think the spacebar doesn't sound or feel as good as the other keys, I'm not sure that this looseness or a separate issue. I do wonder if there is something I could tighten to fix it but it is beyond me, and not time I should have to spend. I'd ask support but I haven't had amazing experience with Keychron support in the past (could itself be considered another nitpick for the price).

3. No palm rest available. The US store does have one in theory. I bought a K14 wooden palm rest, which according to the measurements provided on the US site should be the same height as the correct palm rest (website says they are both 15mm, actual height of K14 one is more like 18mm, which is still about 5mm too low), but the K14 one is slightly too low. I'm going to fix it with some of those clear rubber feet you can put on vases or lamps, but I do think a palm rest option is important for a high keyboard like this. My previous keychron keyboard had a wooden palm rest that perfectly matched and that was a large reason I bought another keychron, because it adds a lot of comfort and polish to the overall setup. I find myself hovering over the palm rest with this keyboard because the palm rest isn't high enough, but I am just not as fast at typing when I hover.

Conclusion:

The actual typing experience is excellent, and I don't notice the spacebar click since it is on the left side and I hit the spacebar with my right hand. The sound of every other key is excellent and much better that I even expected. I'm not super into mechanical keyboard terminology but I'd call the sound very balanced, not too high or low pitched, not too loud but also not timidly quiet. The switches also are great, very stable, smooth (with a subtle tactile bump), well lubed as far as I can tell – I'd like them to be slightly more tactile but that is personal taste, they are tactile enough for me to respond to the tactile bump while typing. Bluetooth works great, with a great portable form factor – a bit heavy to take to a library or cafe but great for bringing around the house to use with my tablet. Remapping keys was easy, although there is no pricise way to customise backlight colour, and on Linux you do need to set up the correct UDEV rules to make sure certain USB devices are writable. That is a normal Linux thing, not unique to this keyboard, but I would have liked some easily accessible Linux instructions for Keychron Launcher to know which UDEV rules might be necessary, since it took some googling and experimentation (I think it was a Keychron article I found that linked to a QMK solution not specific to Keychron that somebody posted on github, which suggested a whole heap of UDEV rules, most of which were not necessary). Below is the UDEV rule that worked for me for this keyboard:

KERNEL=="hidraw*", MODE="0660", GROUP="plugdev", TAG+="uaccess", TAG+="udev-acl"

Overall if I knew how many small issues it would have I might have looked a little longer for other options, especially as high quality prebuilts get a bit cheaper, but I wouldn't be surprised if this is still the best option for the price point.

Edit: the spacebar has gotten quite a bit worse, I now find it quite annoying, and the backspace is showing the same issue. I have contacted support and they have not responded. I would say it is definitely only 3 stars now, not 3 and a half.

Fast delivery, happy with purchase