It's fun to see one of these, but it's too bad they want so much for it ($185.00 opening, and "Reserve not met"). If it were NIB, maybe...

It's important to distinguish this from an Optimus Prime keyboard, too, which transforms into an ice cream truck.

According to Northgate afficionado Mr. Tibbetts, the Avants aren't worth getting, even NIB. They're going to be a cost-cutting rebrand of an actual Omnikey with crummy Alps clone switches.

And apparently there's an issue with the circuitry for the programmable keys which causes them to fail over time.

I think that the price is high, but if you wanted to do something like swap in orange/salmon springs you might get something really nice.

BigAss enter is not bad with 2u Backspace, it then becomes a matter of whether the messed-up Right Shift is a deal-killer.

Man that really looks like a Northgate.

It's because is *is* a Northgate, or rather a successor company that bought the rights and the manufacturing tools to produce the keyboards after Northgate went out of business.

However, the Avant was of generally inferior quality and exclusively used Alps clone switches, which are mediocre at best compared to the real thing. Also, as I mentioned, there's apparently a known problem with its "programmable" keys wherein the circuitry goes bad. It'd not a difficult fix, but an annoying issue nonetheless.

About the only thing the Avant has going for it is that it produced the only known variant of a Northgate board in matte black, like Model M13 or the rare Focus that Chyrosran is looking for.