Beautiful maple keyboard reaches $300K on Kickstarter – smashes target
Understandably we don’t tend to get too excited by keyboards here at Tech Digest. But here’s one that looks quite exciting – and certainly more beautiful than most (I think it’s reminiscent of a butterfly somehow).
Manufactured by Keyboardaudio, it’s called the Model 01 and has already smashed through its Kickstarter fundraising target (target was $120,00 but at the time of writing it has raised over $304,000).
Made of solid maple, it’s perhaps more akin to a high end hi-fi speaker than your standard plastic keyboard, but then this is intended for your serious typist as well as design aficionado. Each of the 64 individual keycaps have been custom sculpted of course and the design of the keyboard is as ergonomic as possible to suit different types of users – see pics below.
However, Keyboardaudio admits the Model 01 won’t be an ideal solution for everyone, as there is a learning curve required to adjust to the split keyboard design. “Typically, most typists start to get acclimated to a new key layout like ours within a few hours, but true mastery of a new key layout is an investment that can take a month or two to really start to pay off,” it reckons.
Finally another feature worthy of note are the independently programmable RGB LEDs underneath each and every key on the keyboard. These can be customised for different kinds of lightshows or switched off altogether. Of course none of this comes cheap. To buy the Model 01 via Kickstarter you are looking at $299, or $999 for the limited edition!
For more information you can see the project on Kickstarter here.
