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Welcome to my unboxing and first look at the Steeler Apex RAW gaming keyboard.
This is also the first unboxing that we're doing in our all-new Steeler
themed gaming den set that we're going to be using for Steeler unboxings as
well as Steeler product videos showing you everything that there is to know
about their products which are somehow different from unboxings
in a certain way that is different. All right, so let's start with what they have to say for themselves about this.
designed for quick reflexes. This is a lowprofile keyboard, meaning that the
keys don't need to be pressed down as far in order to actuate them. It does
use membrane key switches rather than mechanical key switches, but given the
price, this should pretty much be expected. It has raised macro keys, and
we're going to show you how this is used for fast key combinations, as well as a
brilliant white backlight with eight different levels of brightness. Other
than that, I pretty much know everything else there is to know about this
keyboard, having already looked at all this stuff. So, let's go ahead and get
it open. So, Steel Series has a plain black box with a black mat inside. And
then once you open it up, you find pretty much the keyboard itself in a
plastic sleeve, which I'm having a great amount of difficulty removing.
There we go. That was my big effort. That's like uh you know, some kind of
combo that I unlocked. It's like the
plastic removal and put the product down combo. There we go. Okay. We've also got
a quick start guide, which should be pretty much plug the thing into the thing. Although, they might give you a
few little instructions about how to use the software that's included cuz there's
some neat functionality in there. And last but not least, you've got a couple
of rubber feet that can be used to adjust the angle of the keyboard. So,
those just come in a little ziploc bag here. So, we're going to go ahead and
put that behind it and show you guys first the bottom of the keyboard.
And there was a cat incident. So, yes.
All right. So, on the bottom, you've got these two uh rubber feet that do not
move. And then you've got these two here, which can be removed just by popping them off. And then you can plug
a new one into it to give the keyboard more of an angle compared to if you
don't plug it in. So, there you go. You can see that raises it about a centimeter or so, maybe a little bit
more than a centimeter. And that's pretty much it for the bottom of the
keyboard. Other than that, it's uh well, a keyboard. So, let's move on to the
top. Layout wise, I'm so happy to see
Steeler has not committed any cardinal sins, as I like to call them, in terms
of the layout. Long shift key, long enter, long backspace. And I love to see
that macro keys are also sort of uniquely positioned on this particular
keyboard in that they are here on the left where we've seen them many, many
times. And they are also da da da above
all of the F keys. This is for a number of reasons. So the ones here are because
when you're on the WD keys, which are, you know, the pretty much the most
common gaming keys, you can reach this, you can reach this, you can kind of
reach this. You definitely can't reach another row over. And we've seen
keyboards with as many as two or three banks of keys there. Past two, it gets a
little bit on the impractical side. These ones up here are meant for people
who often use their F keys for binding abilities or whatever else. So, what you
can do is you can either hit a macro key and you can actually see I'll give you
guys a better angle here. You can see that the macro key is raised
significantly above the F key. This allows you to feel where the macro key
is without actually actuating either of the buttons. Or you can actually program
the keys to do a particular thing and then a particular thing. So, you can
actually hit a couple of them, one, two,
or even three buttons as a as a combination move. So, this could be
like, you know, fire one bank of missiles, fire two, fire all of them
because we're stuff's getting real, so go for it. Uh, so that's really neat.
So, there's five here, 12 here for a total of 17 macro buttons, and you can
use the L1 or the L2 buttons to switch the functionality. So, you can have an
unlimited number of profiles within the Steel Series Engine software, and then
you can have two layers of macro functionality per profile. Another
really cool thing, I mean this is one of the things they actually don't talk about that much in the marketing, but I
think is really cool is you can completely reprogram any key on the
keyboard to do pretty much whatever you want. You don't have to leave it the way
it is stock. So you can see Steel Series has relocated the Windows key from the
right to the left and the Steel Series key from the left to the right. You can
see my older 7G here has a Steel Series
key on the left and a Windows key on the right. So, according to the feedback
they've gotten, people want the steel or they want the Windows key back on the
left. So, they've gone ahead and done that. Now, this is an ergonomic thing
that Slick Diesel and I all agreed on when we saw this keyboard in the Steel
Series suite, and that is this longer space bar. So, I'm going to try and give
you guys a good look at this. I have two different feet on it right now, so don't
worry. It doesn't normally do that, but there you go. Uh, so what this does is
when you're typing, a short space bar is fine. it doesn't make any difference
because you rest just the the side of your thumb on the key. However, when
you're gaming, you're much more likely to end up in a situation where you have
your thumb resting down like this because you're not sitting on the home
row. You're actually a little bit further up than that. So, what this does is it's it's just meant to be a more
natural way to press the space bar without actually interfering with normal
typing. So, I think that's a pretty cool little thing as well. And moving right
along. Oh, yeah. I should probably show you guys just the overall design of the keyboard. I mean, I talked about how
it's low profile, but it has sort of a cool lowp profofile shape to it as well.
So, I'll do my traditional iPhone size comparison, although with the HT1 HTC1
coming soon. I might be doing away with that pretty soon. So, at its thinnest point, it's actually a little thinner
than an iPhone 4. And then at the thickest point up on the top, it is
significantly thicker than an iPhone 4. So, it has kind of a a curvy sort of
angular angular shape to it overall. You can actually see, I'll show you guys
right here up close if you want to see how much the buttons actually need to be
depressed. That is not to say sad, but uh pressed down in order to actuate
them. One thing I missed about the layout is they've added little bumps on the W key. So, this allows you to more
easily find your way back to them. I personally don't find something like
that that helpful because my landmarks are usually more to do with the
positioning of my spacebar and my shift and then I can find my way back to WD.
But if you have trouble finding it in the dark, then that's something that you
can uh definitely benefit from. Now, I'm
going to go ahead and plug it in, and we'll be back in a moment. So, there are only a few things that are really left.
We've got it plugged in now. You can see the backlight, but we're going to turn the lights off to show it to you in more
detail. So, the Steel Series key is used to control backlight brightness, as well
as your media keys, volume up, volume down, all that good stuff. And they have
readded the diagonal keys over here. So, they had taken them away on some
keyboard and then a bunch of people were upset. So, they have now brought them back. If you wanted the diagonal keys
back, then now you have them. It does
support up to 20 simultaneous button presses, uh, which is sort of an anti-
ghosting type feature that prevents you from accidentally triggering random
extra events, which is what ghosting actually refers to. Most gaming
keyboards do have this feature, but 20 is pretty aggressive, especially for a
USB model. And one thing that's kind of cool about it as well is they have
reduced the width of the keyboard a little bit by narrowing the gaps that
you usually find between the three different groupings of keys on the
keyboard itself. So it makes it still have a very large layout. So you've
still got extra keys at the top and on the side, but without being sort of
extraordinarily wide like something like a G15 Gen 1, which is sort of like that
that first weird sort of lots of macros gaming keyboard. that had like that
screen on the top and all that. Uh the wrist rest is a little bit longer than
usual. So, when you're resting on the home row, you're going to find yourself
right around here. So, there you go. I
personally find that more comfortable. It's one of the things I like about the 7G and dislike about a lot of the other
keyboards that are out there is very, very short wrist rests. And I think that
pretty much wraps it up. So, I'm going to run around and turn off some lights and we'll show you guys the eight
different uh levels of backlighting that are available on it. There's still a
window open, so there's still some light in here, but we're going to go ahead and
step it down one by one.
Oh, it's still Nope, it's off now. There we go.
And I think that's pretty much it. Thank you for checking out my unboxing and first look at the Steel Series Apex RAW.
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