I wasn’t really a keyboard person. Never cared. For years I worked on a MacBook and I knew every key, every shortcut I used daily. It was muscle memory. I didn’t think about the keyboard because I didn’t have to.
Then I switched jobs in January and got a Windows laptop with a pretty annoying Microsoft Copilot key.
The actual problem
The Copilot key is right where I keep expecting something useful to be. I hit it by accident at least a few times a day, a small panel slides out, and I’ve lost whatever I was doing. Coming from a Mac where I knew the layout cold, this felt worse than starting from scratch.
That alone wasn’t enough to send me keyboard shopping. But it stacked with something else: at home I’m switching between three machines constantly. The Windows notebook for work, a MacBook for personal stuff, and a Windows/Linux desktop with its own keyboard. The laptops I just used as-is. Switching between meant adjusting to a different layout, a different feel, a different everything every time, which was fine until it wasn’t.
What I actually needed was one keyboard that could pair to all of them and replace the wired board that had been sitting on my desk doing only one job.
The YouTube rabbit hole
Before buying anything I did what I always do: watched a bunch of videos. Keyboard YouTube is a surprisingly large and enthusiastic place. People have very strong opinions about switches, sound profiles, gasket mounts, and things I’d never heard of or cared about a few weeks earlier.
After enough of that I had a clearer picture of what I wanted, but also a new question: do I actually like typing on mechanical keyboards, or do I just think I will? Seemed worth finding out before spending serious money.
The iQunix A80
I went looking on ricardo.ch first, the Swiss secondhand marketplace where you can find basically anything if you’re patient enough. The idea was to buy something cheap, test whether mechanical keyboards were actually for me, and not feel bad about it if the answer was no.
Found an iQunix A80 for about 80 bucks. It’s still listed for 199 Swiss francs on Galaxus. It has Tri-mode connectivity with Bluetooth on up to three devices, 2.4 GHz wireless via dongle and USB-C wired. Hot-swappable switches, which at the time I thought was a nice feature I’d probably never use.
Switching between devices is one button combo. Bluetooth pairs fast and the 2.4 GHz dongle lives plugged into the desktop for when I need zero latency. I type on the same board whether I’m on the MacBook, the work Windows machine, or the PC. Problem solved.
Verdict
The typing feel is different enough that going back to a laptop keyboard now feels off. So I guess I am a mechanical keyboard person, at least a little.
What I’m less sure about is where it goes from here. I’ve had my eye on the Neo 75 for a bit, which is a significantly more expensive keyboard than the one I bought specifically to avoid spending serious money. I don’t know if that’s a hobby forming or just the natural endpoint of having watched too many reviews.