I know I'm really late to this party. Stick with me though. But to be honest, I haven't kept track of the consumer market in keyboards. Too busy playing with enthusiast stuff and super-obscure nonsense no one cares about
).
I found myself in the Microcenter aisle browsing keyboards. And asking the salesperson who velcro'ed himself to me really hard questions like "Do you still carry the Novatouch?" and "Does this keyboard come in tenkeyless?". (As an aside, according to the salesperson, Microcenter had everything at some point....just in the past. "We used have it in stock!")
Anyways, I hadn't seen a lot of the new switches and boards which have came out. So of course I stopped to play with a bunch of them. I'm still shocked at how much I liked the QS1 switches in the Steelseries Apex 800. If you're late like me, they're Kaihua made linear mechanical keyboard switches which aren't MX compatible. I guess they've got this lens built in so LEDs look nice through the caps? Anyways, they've got a shorter throw like an Alps switch. And it was relatively smooth. Definitely better than MX Reds which I find horribly scratchy and too light (Another aside, I typed on Reds for like 6 months on a work board before forming this opinion). I know that the rated force on the QS1 was 45g but it didn't feel that light to the touch.
It's been a long time since anything in the Microcenter aisle has excited me so I thought I'd just share my thoughts and see if anyone else has an opinion on the switch/keyboard. If it came in TKL/60%, I think I'd pick one up to use for a while. I think it's worth a shot.
