beetle arrived this afternoon. pretty amazed overall. don't know why i was thinking the bezel would be larger but was surprised at how compact it was even with all that aluminum showing. it lacks the bells and whistles (keycap puller, extra keycaps) others offer but the quality of the build seems very high if not higher than its competition.
having said that, this is my first mechanical keyboard, first 60% keyboard and my first post, so take that into consideration. i'm not at a point where i'm ready to critique layouts and fn layers but that's not why i wanted an mk in the first place. i've just recently built my first computer and was looking for aesthetically pleasing accoutrements (since i gave up holding steve job's hand) and stumbled upon this amazingly informative forum. it's been over a week of info consumption and searching sites i've never heard of in hopes of obtaining a good keyboard. if i hadn't come across the happy hacker in the early stages, i probably would have just settled on purchasing a filco ninja from amazon (wait, you can get side printed keycaps!? wait, you can get blank keycaps? wait, they're called keycaps!?). if it wasn't for the hh price i probably wouldn't have come across the kbt pure. if it wasn't for my lack of need for a backlit keyboard i wouldn't have come across the beetle. and here we are today.
thanks to both mashby and laffindude for the super informative posts on the tex! you both really guided me in making my first mk purchase. and yeh, this should prob be in the new members section but it's kind of a 50/50 review thing.
also, contacted justin about a set of blank keycaps and he said he'd ship them to me. pretty excited.