Keychron Q1 Wired Hot-swappable 75% Mechanical Keyboard Grey Version 2

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1. Nick Verified Buyer – 21 November 2024

   ***NOTE: Board depicted with aftermarket GMK keycaps installed.*** Overall, this is a great board with lots of potential, but I’m now realizing that I should have been a little more patient and bought the barebones version of this board instead. I just couldn’t find one in silver without a knob at the time. I wasn’t looking forward to the extra step of ripping out all the stock switches to replace them with Boba U4Ts, but oh well. It’s also worth nothing that there’s only about a $20 difference between the barebones and preassembled versions of this board, so it’s hard to complain too much about the stock keycaps and switches. Some people might like them just fine, but I’m not one of those people. OBSERVATIONS: 1. Chassis. Nicely weighted aluminum. Only a little bit of case ping. It’s heavy enough when fully assembled (nearly 4 pounds with the stock plate) to stay firmly planted on my desk without shifting around. I just kind of wish they didn’t ship this board with a steel plate by default. While they do offer aftermarket POM, FR4, and brass plates, the FR4 plate is the one I really want and the ANSI version has been out of stock like everywhere for quite some time. I may have to brave an AliExpress order to get one. 2. PCB. It has Gateron 3-/5-pin hot swap sockets and south facing RGB, but no per-key RGB that I can tell (no big deal to me though). The USB-C interface is on a daughterboard, which is good for serviceability. When I was researching and shopping for boards, there were number of high-end kits I saw with USB-C ports surface mounted directly to the PCB. Kudos to Keychron for not letting form over function get the best of them. 3. Gasket mounting. The board’s poron gasket mount implementation provides for a decent amount of flex with the stock steel plate, but I am craving just a bit more. I’m thinking swapping to an FR4 plate will help immensely here. 4. Stock switches. The prebuilt boards come with Gateron G Pros. These are actually pretty nice for being cheaper switches (they cost around $0.25 a piece) and they come factory lubed. I think the options (Red, Blue, Brown) would satisfy most folks just entering the hobby. The Brown switches my board came with feel a bit scratchy at times, but that’s been my experience with basically every Cherry MX Brown clone. 5. Stock stabilizers. The stock stabs actually aren’t that bad. They’re lubed pretty well from factory, although I did experience a bit of rattling on the spacebar I had to address with…more lube. I’m going to throw Durock v2s on all around when I get some free time and do a proper hand lube. 6. Stock keycaps. To be honest, I’m just not accustomed to tall spherical profile keycaps and that’s what you’re getting on the prebuilt version of this board. YMMV, but I lose about 20 WPM typing on the stock keycaps because my fingers just can’t get used to them. I find this to be a puzzling design decision on Keychron’s part because most folks are accustomed to OEM or Cherry profile. They are double-shot PBT, but they’re cheapies. I’m also not a fan of the legends. The character kerning on some of the longer keys is really bad. I think they should go back to the double-shot ABS OEM profile keycaps the Version 1 board had. Those ones were much better, at least to me. 7. Programming / key mapping. For now, the VIA implementation on this board is a bit frustrating to deal with because Github hasn’t approved Keychron’s VIA code for this board yet. You have to inject a JSON file every time you launch the VIA app to tweak the board’s settings and mappings. Even worse, the most recent version of the VIA app always defaults to v3 VIA definitions (Keychron’s JSON file is based on v2) and you have to toggle on the now-deprecated v2 mode every stinking time you launch the app. FINAL THOUGHTS: Despite my criticisms with this board, I think it’s still a very good overall once you put a little time and effort into tweaking it. I recommend it.

   

2. Juliet Verified Buyer – 14 January 2025

   When I first time open it up the keycup has red ink that I was unable to remove.

   

3. scottbridges Verified Buyer – 5 April 2025

   I decided to test this Keychron out on my macbook pro. The fancy RGB I turned off, so I’m going to talk function.

   The Red is a tad different to other Red keys from other vendors. Nothing wrong with it, but I thought I had Brown or Blue from the feel. The bottom out feel is abrupt and it will take some time to adjust. I have most Logitechs mechanical and the MX models as well. I also have 3 Razer Huntsman in different flavors. The red optical TKL huntsman is still my favorite, but this came out of the box with potential.

   The steel case is a must. It doesn’t move when typing aggressively. This is where it beats the competition is on the sturdy build.

   I would recommend for MAC users. Windows I’ll probably keep my Huntsman. Either way it’s a top notch keyboard.