Keychron Q1 Pro

Thock and roll.

Some people appreciate the finer details of life; for others they are invisible. MacOS vs Windows, Helvetica vs Arial, that time my dad enthusiastically bought a watch he knew was fake from a beach seller in Spain because “it’s a TAG Heuer”. This discernment isn’t universal to all people or all products: I’m happy driving a basic Honda Civic, I don’t lust after a Type-R. You can either feel the quality in your soul, or you can’t even begin to understand it.

As someone who spends my days hitting keyboards for money, I’ve been curiously uncurious about them. For years, I used my MacBook Pro’s built-in keyboard, swapping it for an identical Apple wireless keyboard when I used a laptop stand. Once, a friend gifted me an old beige keyboard with no printed letters, designed to encourage touch-typing. It looked like an old-school IBM keyboard, but punching its giant mushy mystery keys felt more like I was typing into the gel wrist rest beneath it. ¹

Aside from knowing the fine keyboards from the terrible ones², I was no connoisseur. In 2015, I purchased a Das Keyboard 4 Professional with ‘clicky’ blue switches, which felt like a real upgrade to my Mac’s built-in keyboard, even if it didn’t live up to the marketing hype³. I would describe the switches as ‘pingy’ rather than ‘clicky’. Every key press echoed around inside the keyboard like Gordon Freeman crawling through a vent, which made it impossible to game or type during antisocial hours without waking my wife. It felt tactile when wearing headphones, and it served me well through the entire production run of Five out of Ten and the early pandemic when I taught myself to touch type. It was fine but flawed.

The Das Keyboard started to fail in 2022 in the worst possible way – intermittent space bar failure. This wasn’t so bad when typing for work: it became a kind of surrogate stress ball as I mashed the keyboard when drafting passive-aggressive emails, as if every space held an implied exclamation mark. However, after missing countless jumps and eating one rocket too many in Doom Eternal, enough was enough.

I tried some DIY repair methods to extend the life of the keyboard. I removed every keycap and melted away the grime with a denture cleaning tablet, then vacuumed the toast crumbs and carefully replaced every key. The keyboard was now minty fresh, but no more responsive. Next, I purchased some electrical contact cleaner off eBay (‘contains HFCs’ – I’m sure this stuff is banned in Europe) and tried to work it into the space bar switch to loosen up any gunk. The space bar was just as unreliable, now with an added unpleasant graininess, as the solvent dissolved the switch stems and also my resolve. After watching a few YouTube videos on how to de-solder keyboard switches, I was way out of my depth. I admitted defeat. Die, Das Keyboard, die.

The Search for Thock

The search for a successor didn’t last long. After a few hours down the rabbit hole of keyboard switches, I had a list of requirements:

• High quality ‘brown’ switches. Quick summary for those scared off by that keyboard switch deep dive: my usage was 95% typing, 5% gaming. I wanted tactility without the noise, so ‘red’ gaming switches weren’t the best choice. The Das Keyboard 4 had Greetech switches, a cheap knockoff of the higher quality Cherry MX switch. This was a contributing factor to the failure of my space bar and the pinging sounds.
• Hot swappable switches. If a switch breaks, I want to swap it out without reaching for a soldering iron.
• No numpad. My infrequent usage doesn’t justify the permanent desk space; I can bring my trackball closer to the keyboard and improve ergonomics. (However, this will backfire if I replay Civilization II).
• Backlit. No more gaming in the dark with a desk lamp. The light doesn’t need to shine through the keycap letters – side illumination is fine – giving me a wider choice of high-quality caps.
• Designed for a Mac, obviously. Must have Command and Option keys. Bonus points if Command is labelled ⌘.
• Optional: Bluetooth support so I can pair it with an iPad and create a ludicrous futuristic typewriter.
• Optional: volume knob, which I loved on the Das Keyboard. It’s just fun.
  

If you read the product description of the Keychron Q1 Pro, it’s as if I wrote these requirements retrospectively to justify the purchase. It’s designed as the perfect unmodified keyboard experience for nerds who can justify keyboards on a tax return. It was an easy sell.

The Keychron Q1 Pro experience

I used to work for a management consultancy with a pool of fleet cars, and occasionally borrowed one for work travel. I learned to drive in an old Renault Clio, then a Vauxhall Corsa, and since then, all manner of cheap hire car superminis. The basic consultancy car was a BMW 1 Series. My thought process as I turned the ignition key for the first time was:

“This is alright, but I don’t see why anyone would pay for – OH. Now I get it.”

The rumble and roar of the engine as you accelerated onto the motorway and were pushed back into your seat. The smooth gear changes. The slick in-car entertainment interface. The fine, detailed stitching on the upholstery. The tantalising ‘sport mode’ I didn’t dare activate. Everything about the experience was orders of magnitude beyond a smoke-stained diesel Clio coughing its way around Belfast.

The Keychron Q1 Pro is the BMW 1 Series of keyboards. It’s absolutely unnecessarily refined. Nobody needs this product. In fact, I am not using it to write this sentence – I am using the iPad virtual keyboard that doesn’t have a single physical key! It does the same basic job as a $10 membrane keyboard from Kmart: it comes with the same alphabet, after all⁴. It will improve your typing accuracy, but only in the same way that Nike Vaporflys improve your running speed: basic limb coordination precedes progress.

And yet…

To anyone who fingers letters for a living, this keyboard exudes quality from the first key press. Let’s compare the experience to other keyboards (and their screen fascimiles):

• iPad screen: you squash your finger into the glass until it registers a press. You can’t avoid pressing too hard if you want to type at speed. Sentences have the typing cadence of an amateur drum solo. On an iPad Air, the keyboard is slightly too small for touch typing, so I resort to index finger tapping. It’s accurate enough, but my fingers start to numb from over-exertion.
• MacBook ‘magic’ keyboard: key presses are responsive and snappy, but there’s not much movement (‘travel’) of the keys into the laptop chassis. My thumbs will hit the trackpad at some point and cause chaos on the screen. RSI in my wrist is inevitable within a few minutes of typing if using the trackpad.⁵ It’s not you, it’s me.
• Any cheap keyboard: like typing on a sandwich. Mushy keys, mistyped sentences, crumbs everywhere, sticky fingers.
• Das Keyboard 4 (used): constant gaslighting from the pinging springs when your keystrokes fail to materialise on screen. Like punching into a juice carton with a straw and finding stubborn plastic film intact underneath the foil, over and over again.
  

The Q1 Pro strives for an elusive, elite sound and feel, often described as “thocky”. Imagine using a typewriter submerged in water: you can hear a precise clacking sound, but it is dampened, more refined. It doesn’t punctuate your environment like a typewriter, but it does provide a satisfying, tactile acknowledgement that you didn’t miss that space bar press; you just suck at Doom. It’s soft yet authoritatively supportive, like a buckwheat pillow.⁶

Then there are the other features I didn’t know I needed, like a ‘double gasket design’. On most keyboards, each key travels independently. On the Q1 Pro, you press a key and the entire circuit board moves when the key travel bottoms out. You only notice it through close observation, but it’s another layer of acoustic consideration and refinement that contributes to the plush, premium feel.

The metal casing is ludicrous. The Das Keyboard is built like a sports bike (red details, geeky fonts), but this thing is built like a tank. It is so heavy that it won’t move around, no matter how passive-aggressive the email, but that also limits its portability. I moved it from the office to the kitchen once for an indulgent iPad writing session, and it worked a treat, but perhaps a keyboard shouldn’t weigh more than the computer with which you’re using it.

The Keychron Q1 Pro is a midlife crisis keyboard. It’s a Porsche for computer nerds, way beyond refined to the point of indulgence. The attention to detail is ludicrous, but the details are not filigrees: this is a powerful tool for bulletproof typing with advanced customisation and macros to enhance your productivity, or at least give the illusion of it while you mess around.

It’s the last keyboard I will ever need. Although now I’ve developed a taste for such things, perhaps not the last I will ever buy.

1. I never actually learned to touch-type and instead pecked away with two index fingers, mostly successfully until I needed to use anything outside of the core alphabet. ↩
2. I used the ’butterfly keyboard’ MacBook Pro extensively: it was bad. ↩
3. Fact: the German for ‘the keyboard’ is ‘die Tastatur’ – not as snappy ↩
4. Although probably not a Command key. ↩
5. If you get wrist pain from using a mouse or trackpad, try a trackball – I use a Logitech MX Ergo. Not recommended for gaming, although I did try Quake 3 with a trackball once. It went as well as you would expect. ↩
6. You know you’re in your late 30s when your references include body support, garden tools and the Honda Civic. ↩