14 DAY TRIAL // The 90's came and went, long time ago, and although nostalgia may hit us from time to time, no such thing will come from remembering the quirky split keyboard design.
Being weird and counterintuitive to use, the "ergonomic" keyboards of the '90s were all the rad until they effectively faded out of use - and hopefully memory - at the turn of the millennium.
However, "ergonomic" design still obsesses some designers who ditched only the ABS (Acrylonitrile Butadiene Styrene) material from which the "plastic" keyboards are made and chose wood instead.
Working its way on Kickstarter, Keyboard Model 01 considers itself an heirloom-grade mechanical keyboard designed for serious typists. Its case is built entirely out of maple wood, it's RGB backlit with fully programmable LEDs and can be positioned in four different styles: flat, tripod, tented and spot. Not all of them seem comfortable, nor very user-friendly, but hey, it's wooden!
Excellent materials, questionable design
However, no compromise has been made when choosing the materials of the keyboard; after all, wood is a favorite material of mine, and besides that, they got Matias Quiet Click switches for that perfect button click feel. It also has a metal bottom plaque, and on the top of the cake, an Arduino ATmega32U4 microcontroller that's perfect for programming it for different purposes, even other than typing.
The best thing about it is that you can customize it however you want to, and being a Kickstarter project, you can invest in the project starting with the source code at $1 up to buying multiple keyboards at $2,900, while one Model 01 will cost you no less than $299.
Yes, this is indeed a keyboard project into which a lot of love and care have been put into, and yes, I do love the wooden case but the design of it harkens back too much to that awful split "ergonomic" design of the '90s, so much that even when shaping as a butterfly won't vindicate it.
I do love, however, that it has an "Any" key that you can assign to whatever you like.
