you know i think it's been about five years since steelseries sponsored a
video from us about one of their keyboards though in fairness it's been
about five years since steelseries has really innovated on their keyboards that
changes today so behind me i've got their apex7 lineup they're actually
launching eight keyboards today these ones are using switches that were
created in partnership with gadaron they've got browns blues and reds and
they operate about like you'd expect and then they've got a couple of pretty nice
creature comforts true to steelseries tradition they've got a really nice
magnetic wrist rest my wife is going to absolutely love this feature and they've
got oh check this out illumination on the usb passthrough the coolest thing
though is this OLED screen that's up here in the top right corner use these
two buttons to interact with it actually i don't think this oh yeah there we go
you've got a scroll wheel and a button right here
and that allows you to control the five profiles that you can have pre-loaded on
the keyboard pretty nice RGB lighting all the stuff you'd expect but that's
not the crazy town thing today that is reserved for the apex pro and the apex
pro tkl these are the first keyboards in the world that use what
they're calling what what is this omnipoint mechanical adjustable switches
so i've got one of those little key switch samplers here that has a bunch of
stuff you're used to there's a little blue click and all that good stuff now
this one with the white stem at the end this is what they call an omnipoint and
what it can do is it actually allows you to adjust in software
the actuation point of the key so you can do anything
from 3.6 millimeters which is basically all the way down like if you're one of
those people who pipes with your fist
all the way up to just point four
millimeters which in practical terms amounts to basically brushing up against
the keycap so what this results in is real world improvements in
responsiveness so they are claiming eight times faster response time
five times quicker actuation point and then i mean you're not stuck with that
you can adjust it and two times the durability because
honestly there is no actual
contact between any part of the switch
in order to complete a circuit like you would have with a traditional switch
instead the way that it works is inside every one of these key switches is a
little tiny magnet so on the pcb of the keyboard now it's
only this part here those are the ones that are adjustable but on the pcb of the
keyboard under every single one of these key switches is a hall sensor that is
taking readings at least once every .7
milliseconds for the strength of the magnetic field in the key above it so
that's how the keyboard constantly knows exactly
where the key switch is so what that
means is in addition to being able to individually adjust your RGB profiles or
whatever the case may be on a key by key basis now
you could actually adjust the sensitivity of every key here so all 63
of these on a key by key basis depending
on whether you you know maybe you like to type by bottoming out so if you're
typing you could set it like that or maybe when you're playing shooter games
or whatever else you want to basically treat your keys as almost touch
sensitive that can all be controlled within the steelseries software the way
that you typically would so you've got all your profiles you can automatically
switch profiles when you open up a given program or whatever the case may be now
you might think wow gee Linus that sounds uh that sounds pretty compelling
but uh how does it work is it any good the the demo here is actually
really impressive so we've got their their w key here and you can see we've
got it adjusted to not even as sensitive
as it can be there we go see you can see i'm actually just adjusting it with the
wheel here all right now you can see here i'm just going to like
brush against it barely touch it
and it's actuating crazy right then i go ahead and i change this all the way to
the end and now i try and do the same thing
no typing
now i got to match it now this is not the kind of thing that happens overnight
the actual original patent drawings for this thing you can look them up online
on google were submitted five
years ago but i think for the gamers out there who want the ultimate in
customization it could end up being well worth the wait now one thing i haven't
mentioned yet is what type of switch is it
well the thing is with a blue or a brown where you've got that actuation at about
two millimeters um the idea when they're designing those switches is to have the
tactile bump as close to the actuation point as possible so you get that
feedback in your fingers well you obviously couldn't do that with an
adjustable actuation point unless you could also adjust the tactile point
which these guys are crazy enough it wouldn't surprise me if they're trying
to figure that out but but they haven't gotten there yet so it's a linear switch
just like a red so what i want to hear from you guys here's about where a red
would actuate where would you put it here here here
here i guess the choice is kind of yours so these are coming soon they're going
to be available for 179 for the tkl version and 199 us dollars for the
full-size one or if you're in another region you can find the full pricing and
availability at the link in the video description so thanks for watching guys
if you disliked this video then you must not like innovative keyboard technology
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okay not exactly this shirt but similar shirts and our community forum which you
should totally join so thanks again for watching and thanks again to steelseries
for sponsoring this video here at computex 2019.