Keychron K8 Max Review

I recently spent some money on a mechanical keyboard, and thought I’d share some thoughts on it. I’m not a professional reviewer, nobody’s paying me to write, and nobody’s sending me free stuff. I also don’t usually spend extraordinary amounts of money on gear, so this is a subjective review of a single product, and the comparisons are to other products that are available to me.

The keyboard I purchased is a Keychron K8 Max with “Super Brown” - tactile - switches. The purchase was actually catalyzed by another purchase: my Commodore 64 Ultimate. It made me remember the feeling of high-quality, long-stroked keys, and caused me to look up what’s available on the PC side. Luckily, just when I was researching keyboards, I found this specific Keychron keyboard for about one third off MSRP, and decided to try it out.

I’ve had a cheap gaming keyboard with blue - clicky - switches for years, but it wasn’t much to write home about: Loud, cheap-feeling, but completely decent for its intended purpose, which was mashing keys in games without encountering rollover issues. Unsurprisingly, this keyboard feels radically different, from its physical heft, via the much nicer-feeling key surfaces and keyboard curvature, to the rewarding “thock” of the keys if fully depressed with some force.

The Commodore 64 Ultimate I mentioned earlier comes with linear switches (“Red” or similar). The tactile switches of the Keychron keyboard are relatively similar: strike the keys fast, and you probably won’t notice a lot of a difference, but if you work them slowly, you’ll feel a slight change in pressure a couple of millimeters down - that’s the tactile bit. Typing fast, you get a slightly muffled sound if you allow the keys to bottom out. That can be avoided with some practice by not depressing the buttons all the way, or at least already having slowed the finger movement down by the way the key hits its bottom position. The other, slightly lighter sound, comes from the keys returning to their upmost position. None of the noises is jarring: to me as a user, it becomes an almost meditative background sound when typing like this. I’d say this keyboard should be completely acceptable to your neighbors in an open office environment too.

Using the keyboard with a Mac

Compared to a canonical Magic Keyboard, the layout of the Control, Option and Command keys is a bit off: Since on the Magic keyboard they are inset by the width of an additional key (the Fn/Globe key to the left of the left Control key), I needed to spend some more time with the keyboard to see whether I’d get used to it or not. Could I get used to doing mostly with my pinky finger what I used to do with my thumb? It turns out about one working day was enough to get comfortable, if not fluent with the new key arrangement. Getting there included making some changes to the keyboard’s default configuration.

Using the Keychron Launcher web app, I made the Caps Lock key take over as a mode toggle, to give access to the keyboard’s second layer. I then mapped Del to the second layer’s backspace key - mimicking the functionality of Fn+backspace on the Magic Keyboard. I also mapped the arrow keys in Vim style (left, down, up, right) to HJKL on the second layer. Combined with the Shift, Option and Command keys, this means I don’t have to move my fingers over to the separate arrow keys and ins/del/home/end/PgUp/PgDn cluster in normal use. They’re still available, but not necessary.

The second thing that takes some getting used to with this keyboard, is using it alongside a Magic Trackpad. The latter is, of course, designed to be flush with the Magic Keyboard, while the Keychron K8 Max sits several centimeters higher, especially with its rear feet down. It’s more of a stretch, and I’m sure someone who was more bothered by the difference could 3D print a stand for the trackpad, to raise it to the level of the top of the keyboard, but honestly it’s not that bad, if you ask me.

In short, this keyboard turned out to be a joy to work on with the Mac.

Using the keyboard with a Linux PC

When switched to “Windows/Android” mode, the Keychron K8 Max behaves just like any standard PC keyboard. Alt and Windows key caps are included in the box, to replace the default Mac keys between the Control keys on either side, and the space bar. I would prefer a choice of OS agnostic meta keys, but Windows is undeniably the default choice on the PC side, so I guess I can’t complain too much about this. In PC mode too, the keyboard is programmable using the Keychron Launcher web app; utilizing the keyboard´s banks 2 and 3 rather than banks 0 and 1 that are used in Mac mode.

One thing that isn’t immediately obvious, is that the security model of Linux by default prevents software from making changes to the keyboard’s programming. The workaround is to either make the requested changes from the Mac, or to configure a udev rule for the keyboard:

First I created a file, /etc/udev/rules.d/99-keychron.rules; and then I filled it with the following information, partly based on the output of the lsusb command, and partly based on advice from a Kagi search:

KERNEL=="hidraw", SUBSYSTEM=="hidraw", ATTRS{idVendor}=='3434', ATTRS{idProduct}=="0a81", MODE=="0666", GROUP=="users", TAG+="uaccess", TAG+="udev-acl"

Then I restarted the udev service and forced it to re-read its rules:

sudo udevadm control --reload-rules && sudo udevadm trigger

After this, I could use the Keychron Launcher via a Chromium-based browser to update the keyboard configuration as I wanted: At this point I only added the same shortcuts to the keyboard’s upper memory banks that I already had for the Mac, as I think I’ll enjoy them.

Other notes

The Max model of the Keychron K8 has three connection types available: Wired via an included USB-C to USB A cable, wireless via a 2.4 GHz dongle - similar to what Logitech has done for many years - and wireless via Bluetooth, where the keyboard allows pairing with up to three different devices.

The 1000Hz polling rate - nice for gaming - is only available via wired or 2.4GHz wireless connections. Using Bluetooth, polling rate is lowered to one tenth of that: Still plenty for regular productivity use. The way I’ve set it up today, is I use the 2.4GHz dongle in my Linux gaming computer, and then I use two of the available Bluetooth connections for my private and work Macs respectively. I never use both Macs docked to my screen simultaneously, so there’s really no extra hassle switching the keyboard between them; and when I want to play a game, I flip the two mode switches on the left-hand side of the keyboard, and I’m ready to go.

Summary

The Keychron K8 Max was a very nice upgrade for my typing experience. It rewards sticking to good typing form, and I really enjoy the feedback it provides when I type on it. For a PC user, it can be used out-of-the-box with no changes required at all. A Mac user may use it as-is, but if you are a power user, accustomed to making the most of the keyboard on your laptop, or of the smaller model Magic Keyboard, you may want to slightly adjust some of its default behaviors.

This could turn out to be an expensive purchase, though: While this keyboard is perfect for my Linux gaming computer, I’m already toying with the idea of purchasing a more compact model for use with my Macs: I will keep experimenting with my writing form and with customizing the key maps to see what I can get away with: I don’t think I’ll want to live with the compromises of going all the way down to a 60-key keyboard like the Happy Hacking Keyboard, but you never know…