Covering the TKL there are a few two things that stand out in this price range for one the U.S price lists for 139.99 now the Pro TKL has gone on sale for the same price historically sometimes so it's important to know how it Compares against the pro because some people may actually like this variant better it just kind of depends on what you're looking for.
But basically you have a military-grade aluminum top plate so there's very minimal Flex I'm going to go over the physical design of the keyboard first so these are double shot PBT caps now the biggest one of the biggest selling points to me and surprises it was the PBT caps so just getting right into it all the keyboards I've ever reviewed or used have traditionally been abs whether double shot or not ABS has a different feel to it I like PBT because it doesn't wear like ABS does quality ABS can last a long time they also look really good with RGB um but these PBT caps shouldn't fade or start looking shiny after let's say a year so whether you have something like a MacBook Pro or an old keyboard that uses ABS plastic for example you've probably seen that your space bar is starting to get a shine to it and that's just because the keycap material so I do want to call out the PBT now as far as the design goes it is relatively compact the bezels are actually really thin and I'll show you how it Compares against a rock hat Vulcan keyboard the volume wheel on the top right also doubles as an action key so I can press this in sorry as a mute key so I can press this into mute scroll up and down for volume and then this button is your media key so play pause double tap to skip forward Etc which you can customize the USBC Port so I like this I'm going to grab the cable but um the USBC cable is detachable and it's offset to the left unlike the pro or the other Apex line which integrates the wire in the back and it has like a channel system so you can route it left right or middle this one is fixed on the outside only so you are stuck with it on the left side while I have this upside down there's three different height or tilt settings to look at so you have flat which is going to have these six rubber feet on it you can flip the little feet up and that'll you know kick it up at a slight angle I'm not sure how much you're going to be able to tell based off this picture so let's go back to Flat real quick now I'm laying flat I'll kick up one foot that's two that's the angle of one foot and let's do the longer one and you can see that raises it up quite a bit so it's all preference it has a pretty short footing regardless now what's interesting is when the feet are up uh there's no rubber on the inside usually I see rubber on the feet that kick up so that was kind of different but it still didn't really slide on my desk whether I was using it on the wood surface or a mat like this um and then the other interesting thing so this rubber top right here is actually a cover for a keycap puller which I haven't seen before um obviously I don't review tons of keyboards but I'm familiar enough with some of them and this was a kind of a cool little hidden tool now this tool is all plastic so while I found that it did a totally fine job grabbing Keys you can see how painless that was um it these keys are actually pullable so if for any reason you need to swap the keycap out they make different uh key switches as well so depending on what kind of feel you want for the key switch you can actually remove them and steel series sells different packs online to help you customize it based off your typing preference or feel now Apex 9 vs other Apex KBs when you compare the apex9 to the Apex Pro Series a lot of people will assume the pros just better regardless but it kind of depends on what your preferences are for example you might want a shorter or longer keystroke feel and the optical switch is found on the Apex 9 has a much shorter actuation point which ranges from 1 to 1.5 and you can customize that in the steelseries engine software when you look at the Apex Pro the pro can range from 0.4 millimeter all the way to 3.6 millimeter as an actuation point which is basically when the key press is registered however it's also a dual input so that's probably the most unique thing because on the pro you could actually have it so if you're doing wasd for movement a lighter press on W as walk and pressing in the W harder or all the way down will actually make your character Sprint if you configure it now you can also so there's different profiles and typing modes there's game and then typing basically and game is your shorter actuation point so only one millimeter and typing is 1.5 I found that I pretty much had to use typing I tend to rest my fingers on the keys more and a one is really really short and fast so if you're concerned with accidental key presses um you know that's something to consider the Deep there's no debounce either with an optical switch so you like tap it and let go that input's been registered you don't have to worry about like a double press or anything Optical is incredibly accurate and fast because it's using light instead of a mechanical switch now just like the Apex Pro and the Apex 7 you also get onboard memory so there's five custom profiles that you can assign to the keyboard that's built into the keyboard it has onboard memory so all you have to do is press the steel series icon and tap F10 and doing so will cycle through all of your presets now the Apex 9 has a lighter actuation Force so it's actually closer to the Apex 3 actuation Force which is in the 30s so basically you have 35 grams of actuation for us on the nine the Apex 7 is about 46 and so is the Apex Pro they're all fairly comparable now perhaps one of the biggest advantages to the Apex 9 over honestly every other Apex series is the response time because this is using optical it has a response time of 0.2 milliseconds which is crazy fast and even the Apex Pro is 0.7 milliseconds so this does offer a speed benefit purely from a response standpoint thanks to those Optical switches now one of the most noticeable things from the Apex 9 versus the pro is the actuation length so how long the keystroke actually moves and I'm going to show you on the Apex 9 first so with the optical switch it actually bottoms out above the board you get about 60 66 percent or so of the travel distance and on the Apex Pro you can see it goes all the way down so you can feel that much longer keystroke and depending on what your preferences are this is kind of in between a low profile keyboard and a traditional actuation link I really do like the optical switch and then as you saw in the spec sheet the actuation force is lighter so and it's also very very linear and fairly quiet just like the Omni points these are great switches I'm not knocking the pro at all but it's still very easy to type on this because it has a nice consistent resistance feel so it feels very natural. Final Thoughts really like the apex9 it's become my daily driver I should have done this review over a month ago to be honest I've just been using it so much lately there's two reasons why I like that it's quieter than my rocket Vulcan lineup and I really have I've been using Vulcan keyboards for years they've been my favorite of all the boards I've purchased and tried that I don't review I just have a lot of keyboards but I've always liked Vulcan between the RGB and the way the key switches feel and I've been using the apex9 now because this one's also using optical switches I tend to I guess prefer that but the PBT caps like age really well like they are not showing signs of wear and that's going to be really good for the long term if you want to spend the least amount of possible and you want the brightest RGB something like the rock hat Vulcan is going to give you more RGB to me this is just a little bit more understated but I'd rather in my case for how I'm using it lately I really liked the PBT caps and how the board feels and I just like that it's slightly quieter without feeling like a cheaper quiet keyboard if that makes sense a lot of The Quiet keyboards don't really give me the same typing experience and feel that this is getting me closer to that but I still have a premium board to type on so I think that says a lot about the board anyway that about wraps up the review this is a little bit of a different the format I hope you found something new about this board or I helped answer your questions.
0 Comments