Posted by aemerson_ 1 day ago
Altar II has fully mechanical switches, plus a magnetically detachable dial, haptic feedback, a red backlight, and a native macOS companion app.
I’m a heavy Mac user and I feel that Apple hasn’t given its keyboards the attention they deserve, in terms of hardware, software, and features, so I set out to try and change that.
It was a massive undertaking and it has taken almost 2 years to get to this stage. One of the main obstacles was fitting a reasonably sized battery into the chassis, and aggressive power profiling without messing with the user experience. Another issue was we couldn’t fit any components on the underside of the PCB because there was literally no space to do so (and there are a lot of components).
Around 4 years ago I posted my first keyboard to HN (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32507172). Its response blew me away and ultimately led to me quitting my job and making and selling keyboards full time. I’ve taken some of the feedback from that original post and incorporated it into Altar II (e.g. the detachable dial).
I’ll be around to answer any questions. Please let me know what you think, I’d love to get some feedback.
Do also bear in mind the final retail price is $349. the $249 price is for early pre-orders only.
That said, big fan of that volume button!
I reckon it's doable, but very risky. There's clearly an awful lot of work in this, so the engineering costs aren't going to be trivial. You need to sell a few thousand of them at that $250 price point to break even. On top of that, at this price point it is a luxury product. This means customers expect perfection. You can't afford any kind of QA whoopsies, and especially with a machined metal case it is a recipe for disaster.
Small DIY keebs are quite doable. Mass-produced keebs are quite doable. Boutique designer ones? Cutthroat market with zero room for errors. Stay tiny, grow huge, or go bust.
It's apparently a UNIX thing, and old Apple, NeXT, some of DEC, Sun, HP UNIX, Sony NEWS, even IBM XT, many of modern Mac JIS, etc. seem to/did/do have the legends for that key as "Control", "CTRL", or "Ctrl". I think that adds even more to the cool factor.
I respect that you're doing a single variant up front, and I understand the business challenges and risks of going wide on a niche product like this... but as a single datapoint, I'll pay double for an ortholinear with similar features and style.
The switches look like cherry ultra low profile switches. I’ve not tried these out, how do they feel compared to the linear kailh choc v1’s you used before.
They feel quite different to the Chocs, unsurprisingly. Although the required actuation force is close to the Choc Reds (40gf on our switch vs 50gf on the Choc Reds), because it's spread over such a small vertical travel it feels much "snappier". There is also very little pre-travel. It's kind of like a much sharper/tactile feeling chiclet switch with more vertical travel, if that makes sense.
One of the advantages was that you could pour a cup of coffee into the keyboard and it would just keep working.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ryanlpeterman/compose-s...
or this that is in stock but doesn't exactly follow Apple's layout
https://www.ozokeyboards.com/products/jiffy75-wireless-split...
I'm curious what the purpose of haptic feedback on an already mechanical keyboard is?
Cool that you've been able to turn this into a livable business though.
It throws a `Uncaught (in promise) NotSupportedError: The element has no supported sources.` on `audio.play();` at the very end of main.js.