TLDR — Will buy again and again. this keyboard is now my daily driver
Personally I love the feel of a good mechanical switch, I can spend hours just typing nonsense.. but I’m not a big fan of the look of mechanical keyboards, most of them are needlessly bulky looking more like portable typewriters and some of them are needlessly wide taking up too much desk space. I understand a lot of people prefer it that way, I for one have a very minimalistic taste.
When I discovered Low-Profile mechanical keyboards were a thing, I did some digging. I didn’t just want low-profile, I wanted as slim as possible, like laptop keyboard slim. At the time I only found 2 choices, Hexgears X-1 and Keychron K1.
Hexgears X-1
Hexgears had some really bad and shady reviews back when I looked into it, and up until now their customers are experiencing issues which they should’ve fixed already before continuing to sell more batches of their product.
Keychron K1 v3 arrived
I finally decided to purchase the Keychron K1 v3 with WM yellow switches. It looked amazing, fits in with the rest of my setup. I loved this thing so much I cleaned it every month.
Sadly though after just 5 months of use, the switches started failing, sometimes they’ll click sometimes they won’t. It got much worse over time when my vital keys started failing completely, keys like spacebar, brackets, comma, and arrow keys. I’m a programmer and I absolutely need these keys to code properly.
One other small problem is that the black paint on the left ctrl key has started chipping off because I’ve been hitting it with my nails. And on the keycap’s legs broke and is now stuck inside the switch.
Keychron Support
I reached out to keychron since they’ve got a 1 year warranty, described my issue and sent recordings of my keyboard not working as intended. Shortly after I got an email asking me which keys I’d prefer on the replacement keyboard. One of the smoothest support I’ve ever gotten, and I’m just a regular customer who’s made one purchase, not an influencer that gets special treatment.
Sad to see my defective v3 become a paperweight now, it still looks brand new. I’ll try repairing and replacing the switches when I find the time.
I did some research, they’ve since then discontinued the K1 v3 and they’ve released K1 v4 which now only came with Gateron switches, I’m guessing the newer switches solves my issue. Either way I’m relieved they’re replacing my v3 with v4, otherwise I might end up having the same issue again after several months.
Keychron K1 v4 arrived
I was slightly disappointed unboxing the v4 because some of the extra keycaps were bent out of the box and those were the windows keys. Yes I’m a windows user, but being stuck with mac keycaps isn’t so bad. Luckily I was able to bend back the gray ESC keycap without breaking it, being stuck with an obnoxiously orange ESC key would’ve been a deal breaker for me.
Simple quality control would’ve solved this though. I know it wasn’t damaged through shipping, the box had no noticeable damages and I’m not the only customer that experienced the same thing. I found this out on their facebook group.
Other than that, K1 v4 feels and looks even better than the v3, I just wish I had the option to choose the v3’s black flat key caps over v4’s new curved gray key caps.
Oh and the lighting is great but not consistent, it’s neat that the bottom of the keys reflect the lighting but not all keys have the same effect, like the keys on top of the spacebar or the keys at the very bottom.
Would I recommend the Keychron K1 V4?
Yes, absolutely yes, both the keyboard and the brand. Not many companies out there maintain this close relationship between their customers.
Just make sure you’re buying the latest version of their products directly from their site, there are some outdated keychron keyboards out there being sold with possibly defective switches.
Ghost Developers
I’ve been using this amazing keyboard to work on some upcoming open source projects. Join us in Ghost Discord if you wanna talk code, design, learning resources, etc..
You can also support our open source group on Patreon.
