The Lowfree Flow84 is the latest episode in my on-again, off-again love affair with mechanical keyboards. I describe it as the mechanical keyboard Apple would make for a mix of good and bad reasons, but we’ll get to that!
It’s one of a relatively new breed of low-profile mechanical keyboards, something that would have seemed a contradiction in terms just a few years earlier …
What’s a mechanical keyboard anyway?
Given that Apple-style chiclet keyboards now dominate the market, and many Mac users won’t be old enough to recall anything prior to those, it’s perhaps worth beginning at the beginning.
MacBook keyboards, and the various Apple Magic Keyboards, are constructed with ultra-slim keys sitting on top of a two-part scissor mechanism. It’s this which provides the springiness, and which pushes each key back up after use.
This mechanism is quiet in use, and most importantly for Apple purposes requires very little height. This means they can be used in ultra-slim MacBooks. (We’ll gloss over the time the company went too far with this …)
But scissor keyboards also have significant downsides, of which the biggest one is the lack of feel. They are simply not very satisfying to use from a tactile or auditory perspective. Which is where mechanical keyboards come in.
These use more robust switches beneath each key, with far longer travel. Depending on the type of switch used, they may sound clicky, clacky, or thocky – the three terms most commonly used to describe the auditory variations.
Mechanical keyboard fans prefer the larger physical movement, as well as the absolute tactile and audible feedback that a keypress has registered. The combination of the two tends to result in greater accuracy, as well as – somewhat counter-intuitively – faster typing speeds.
Finally, most mechanical keyboards offer almost infinite customization options. You can buy a wide variety of different switches, each with their distinctive sound and feel, as well as a huge range of keycaps that allow you to choose the shape, color, finish, typeface, and more.
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