I bought my first computer in the spring of 2002. I had come late to personal computers. It was a Fujitsu laptop that I bought from a big box electronics store near Enmachi in Kyoto. It took a few months before it was even connected to the internet!
A couple of years later, I made the switch to Apple and bought a 17 inch iMac G4 off of a friend who was getting the 20 inch. The flat-panel G4 was iconic because of its lampshade design. I loved it, and it was partly on that machine that I learned design. I have owned many computers in the intervening years, but to this day I still think about the keyboard that came with that old iMac — the JIS version of the A1048. It had big chunky keys that clacked (a bit) when you typed. It felt great.
Since then I have experimented a bit with mechanical keyboards, some split style ones and even some straight columnar ones, all courtesy of some real keyboard-freak friends. I agree that something you spend 8-12 hours touching all day, should be optimized for you. However, I spent a lot of time rushing from meeting to meeting with a laptop, and it didn’t seem that optimal to be switching external keyboards all the time.
Now I am in my home office, and spend most of my time on my 27″ iMac. I do go out occasionally, but take my iPad Pro with its little keyboard when I am on the road. Since most of my time is here at my standing desk at home, beside my window that looks out over the port, I decided to take the opportunity and get a big, chunky, loud THERE IS A WRITER AT WORK, CAN YOU NOT HEAR!? keyboard.
I looked around quite a bit, and asked some friends, and ended up getting the Keychron K2 with white backlight and brown switches. It checked off most of my boxes:
- Bluetooth
- backlight (check out the action here)
- decent switches
- relatively compact
- looks sweet!
The only thing I couldn’t get was a Japanese layout. There is a really good Japanese mechanical keyboard outfit, but they only make keyboards for Windows computers, and I wanted something I could use out of the box without any key-surgery.
So after a bunch of deliberation, I went for the K2, a reasonably priced keyboard with a good rep. It arrived today. Take a look!
Unboxing
I have been clacking away at it all morning. I am going to need a few days to get used to it. I totally prefer the arrow key config compared the Apple Magic Keyboard, but having the Backspace and Return buttons not at the edge of the keyboard means I cannot be so wild with my typing.
Here it is on my desk. (The woody looking thing is my iPhone charger… I was using my phone to take this picture.)
