Show HN: I spent 2 years designing a mechanical Magic Keyboard

As near as I can understand it, macOS supports a smart card reader (and apparently will defer to its sign-off for authentication duties when it's present and configured, and Touch ID isn't), so if you emulate a smart card reader you can make your own fingerprint sensor and have it say "I'm a smart card" and sign challenges like a smart card does.

The creator is very up front that this isn't equivalently secure for preserving state secrets, as if you carefully tear this device apart you can just short the pins that the sensor part connects when it's happy with the fingerprint. On the other hand, it is hilarious that anyone who isn't a person of interest for the CIA, Mossad, MI6, or FSB would think they're important enough for someone to go to the trouble of using that method to unlock their secrets. Anyone else would just club you over the head or slip you a mickey, and stick your unconscious finger on your fingerprint sensor.

People are raising a good point RE Touch ID. It is possible to add a fingerprint sensor. But that fingerprint sensor will never be able to do the things that Touch ID is most useful for: i.e. use Apple Pay. It would be incredibly confusing to have a fingerprint sensor that was usable for some things and not for others. Therefore the better experience today is to not include a fingerprint sensor at all, imo.

This is a cheap way to try to subvert legitimate criticism by trying to shame others into not voicing their criticisms, and is exactly the opposite of what HN is intended for.

CC @gtsteve

https://teenage.engineering/products/op-1/original

Oh and the dial sticks out a bit too much too, would've preferred if it were a flat dial that sat flush with the rest of the keys.

With regard to Windows keys that is a possibility. We shipped our previous keyboard, Altar I, with both Mac and Windows markings on the keys.

https://keychron.ca/blogs/news/kailh-mechanical-switch-guide

If you'll indulge me for a moment, because I never get to talk about this stuff: the corner radii of the cards on the site are actually "squircles" rather than perfect rounded corners. To me this is much more pleasing to the eye. The squircles are achieved by creating a PNG mask which is then 9-sliced and expanded to mask off the edge of the cards. Another mask is used for the stroke and laid on top of the first mask, to give the gradient border effect.

[0]: https://www.cherry.de/en-us/product/mx-ulp-tactile

The firmware source code will be published publicly on Github in the future, as our other keyboard (Altar I) is: https://github.com/electronicmaterialsoffice/firmware-altar-.... Anyone is welcome to play around with it.

We could include _a_ fingerprint sensor, and even include a special secure/tamper-proof chip, but it would never be able to work with things like Apple Pay. It would probably be able to do some things like log you in to your Mac by spoofing itself as a card reader or secure key. But because we can’t communicate with Apple’s Secure Enclave it would never be a seamless experience.

Maybe someday Apple could open up Touch ID like they do with Find My. But for now it’s pretty much a non-starter.

What I'd love to have is a standalone touch ID sensor that I could attach anywhere -- mechanical keyboard, side of the monitor, under my desk, etc. I guess this is bottlenecked by Apple's IP on the device, so I've considered just hacking one together by deconstructing and extracting an Apple keyboard...

Do also bear in mind the final retail price is $349. the $249 price is for early pre-orders only.

I reckon it's doable, but very risky. There's clearly an awful lot of work in this, so the engineering costs aren't going to be trivial. You need to sell a few thousand of them at that $250 price point to break even. On top of that, at this price point it is a luxury product. This means customers expect perfection. You can't afford any kind of QA whoopsies, and especially with a machined metal case it is a recipe for disaster.

Small DIY keebs are quite doable. Mass-produced keebs are quite doable. Boutique designer ones? Cutthroat market with zero room for errors. Stay tiny, grow huge, or go bust.

They feel quite different to the Chocs, unsurprisingly. Although the required actuation force is close to the Choc Reds (40gf on our switch vs 50gf on the Choc Reds), because it's spread over such a small vertical travel it feels much "snappier". There is also very little pre-travel. It's kind of like a much sharper/tactile feeling chiclet switch with more vertical travel, if that makes sense.

But seems like that is not the case.

(no affiliation, saw a thread on it here)

https://qwerty-lafayette.org/

There are a couple of small quality-of-life features that do require the app: for example if you want haptic feedback when you receive a notification. This is because the keyboard has no idea what is happening on your OS, and requires some middleware. But all the core functionality requires no app at all.

To answer your second question, the firmware for Altar II will be open-sourced, as the firmware for our Altar I keyboard is. You can see the Altar I firmware source code here: https://github.com/electronicmaterialsoffice/firmware-altar-...

Both Altar I and Altar II firmware are based on the open-source ZMK (https://zmk.dev). We try to contribute back to ZMK whenever we can because we have benefitted so much from it. Two members of our team are also long-standing ZMK contributors.

For a laptop or for a desktop? For a desktop the keyboard sits its entire life on the... desk?

And a laptop happens to have its own keyboard. The only people I know who use an external keyboard with a laptop do it precisely because they want a particular mechanical switch / keyboard layout.

Are there people taking their Magic keyboard with them in their backpack or car or whatever just to hook it to a laptop? I don't think many do that.

So you find a keyboard on a desk looks clunky? Do you need a "not clunky" keyboard to take pictures you post on Instagram?

I've got a 60% mechanical keyboard on my desk: its footprint is smaller than some Magic keyboard versions. And, well, vertically there's room on my desk.

(I always liked the idea of the Touch Bar, but in practice I only used it to change the volume. I still miss that, though. Now I have to Opt-Shift-Volume to try to get the right volume, which is always halfway between the options somehow.)

There is a video by one of the ZMK team members where he tested ZMK latency (wired and wireless) against other options on the market - it is, however, fairly dated: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWL4nU-vtWs

The USB port allows for wired operation while charging. The fact that some products refuse to do this still bothers me (cough MX Master 3).

I visited a mechanical keyboard shop, tried about 20 of them including low profile variants, then visited an Apple shop. Both shops allowed me to sit down and measure my typing speeds on a computer over many trials.

The apple magic keyboard, full-size, gives me about 10-20% faster typing speeds. Over the previous three years I had only used mechanical keyboards.

I also found it very aesthetically pleasing to type on, rivalled only by the Logitech pebble in terms of subjective feel. There's something about feeling the whole aluminium frame and plastic membrane flex when I hit a key hard that I find pleasing in a way that isn't matched by many other keyboards.

I bought one, and it's the only piece of apple hardware I own. My 3 mechanical keyboards are collecting dust.

Altar II is quite a quiet keyboard, and there is a special sandwich of materials specifically designed to make it as quiet as possible.

The built-in speaker is interesting. Really it's just there because it's fun, and its nice to get the odd bleep or chime when your keyboard connects or begins charging.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html

Me and my preorder

If we did a numpad I would probably do it as a separate device. Personally I don't like how the numpad sits between the edge of my keyboard and mouse. I'd prefer it to the left of my keyboard or to the right side of my mouse.

People are programming on a 36-key keyboards just fine and they don't miss any keys. It's easier to press fn + something than reaching out for screenshot button, which is usually far away. That way, you don't have to move your hands.

If you have any questions I'd be very happy to answer them.