I don’t know what it is with Mechanical Keyboards, but someone somewhere made up a rule that they have to be large and ugly. Though it’s an amazing keyboard to type on, my biggest gripe with my Das Keyboard is its size — primarily due to the number pad. After a long time using Apple’s bluetooth keyboard I became used to having my mouse (and now Magic Trackpad) closer proximity than a numpad allows. Granted, it’s only a few inches, but it feels as if my Magic Trackpad is in another time zone. Yet I like my mechanical keyboard far too much to give it up simply to move the Magic Trackpad closer to the Home Row.

The QuickFire Mechanical Keyboard is the only one I’ve been able to find that has ditched the numpad and which also uses the Blue Cherry MX switches (the same ones found in the Das Keyboard and the ones that are known as being best for typing). Knowing what I know now about mechanical keyboards, if I were in the market for a mechanical keyboard I’d buy the QuickFire and then pick up a few keycaps replacements to ditch the Windows-friendly labels with Mac-friendly ones.