Keychron K6 mechanical keyboard

Towards the end of September I went on a tiny shopping spree. You know, what do we do when we are sad? Add to cart. Next to an An iPhone 14 Pro Max, finally caving in and putting together a gaming PC, a new monitor, I obviously needed something that does 4k144 for that gaming PC aaaand the topic of today, a Keychron K6, this keyboard here. We have then also gone on a trip to Copenhagen for a few days. Sticking to instant noodles to recuperate the costs seemed logical… but apparently someone wasn’t on board with that idea.

This isn’t a review of the keyboard itself. It’s a perspective piece from someone who is completely new to mechanical keyboards and comes from mainly using MacBook Pro keyboards. If you are looking for an actual review of the Keychron K6, there are plenty out there already, by creators who are far more knowledgeable than I would ever care to be on this subject. Please check out those for a qualified review.

Apple Keyboard

I actually already had a keyboard that I really liked, for typing. A Magic Keyboard with Touch ID and Numeric Keypad… rolls right off the tongue, doesn’t it? I am just going to refer to it as the Apple Touch ID going forward, to make this a little easier. What I like about the Apple Touch ID is that it’s fairly close to how the keyboard on my MacBook Pro feels. Not exactly, but kind of close. For typing, Photoshop, Final Cut, the things I spent the most amount of time on- that keyboard is just about perfect for me. I tend to only hear negative things about Apple Keyboards and didn’t really understand the hype about mechanical ones. Ignoring the unquestionably awful butterfly keyboards they made between 2015 and 2019, I can’t really find any fault with the currently available options. Using this keyboard on a windows machine is a little odd, but it also wasn’t designed for that. Don’t get me wrong, it would have been doable just fine, but considering that I am using my new PC for games and OBS exclusively, I was at least curious to try one of these “fancier” keyboards. So, add to cart once again.

Why the Keychron K6

I wanted something that looks cool and is functional, without breaking the bank. As we have established in the beginning, I have spent enough money and daily instant noodles apparently aren’t an option. In all seriousness though, as I had already spent quite a lot on both the PC and the new monitor, I wanted to keep the Keyboard under 200 € and the Keychron K6 fit in nicely at roughly 135 € incl. shipping. The full name with specs reads as: Keychron K6 Wireless Mechanical Keyboard (German ISO-DE Layout) RGB Backlight Aluminium Frame / Gateron G Pro Mechanical (Hot-Swappable) / Red. I gotta be honest, I know less than half of the terminology here. Being a 65% Keyboard it is relatively small in size, but still retains the arrow keys, something that was very important to me. The only thing that I am missing is a function key activated numpad across “7 8 9 0 u i o p j k l ; m , . /”, but maybe that can be added later with software mapping or something. That is something I knew before buying this however, so I am not actually critiquing the keyboard for it.

Learning curve

While I use a physical German layout, I am used to a US layout on a software level. I know it’s a weird combination, but just so you are aware, that when I am referring to certain keys and point at them, they might be labelled differently from what I am actually referencing. At the very least it’s consistent across all my keyboard options. As it’s the same, moving over was actually quite easy. I can touch-type just fine and only have to look at the keyboard for function keys related stuff.

Something I struggled with in the beginning was hitting the enter key however. I don’t know why exactly, but that key feels really far away. Whenever I tried to hit it there was a 50/50 chance that I would hit the backslash key instead. After roughly a month or so of using the keyboard, I got used to it and it’s now no longer an issue. The other one was the options key, which on my Apple keyboard occupies more of the space under the Z key, whereas on the Keychron K6 it’s pretty much just below the tilde key. This isn’t an issue anymore either though.

The key travel on the other hand is something that took a lot longer to get used to and still isn’t something I feel 100% comfortable with. The actuation point is relatively early, so that’s nice, but going from the top all the way to the bottom is quite a bit of work coming from an Apple keyboard. As I mentioned earlier, I went for the red switches. I have no experience with blue ones, but I have tried the brown ones before and already knew that I didn’t like them. So at least from the description between the red and blue ones, the red ones seemed to be the choice for me. Even now, I don’t think I made a bad decision, but it does take a lot of getting used to; pressing keys with noticeable travel.

Feel and performance

In early October I had also done a few tests across the three keyboards to get an idea how I fare on them

Results

88 WPM on the Keychron K6
94 WPM on the Apple Touch ID
90 WPM on the MacBook Pro’s Keyboard

While I type relatively slowly, I was surprised to see that I had the fastest and an almost flawless typing experience on the Apple Touch ID when compared to the other two keyboards. I expected to do much better on the MacBook Pro’s internal keyboard to be honest. While I am not surprised by the fact that my performance with the Keychron K6 is at the bottom, I am somewhat impressed by how much better I was using it during that test compared to a few days prior. When I first received the keyboard and tried a typing test, I was sitting at around 55 WPM, which was, well, demotivating.

When it comes to comfortability, I’d still go with the MacBook Pro’s keyboard. I actually haven’t used my Apple Touch ID since I purchased this keyboard. So even though I really like that keyboard, it’s kind of out of the running. As my desk setup looks like this now, my monitor having a built-in KVM and me not wanting to keep switching keyboards, It’s very difficult to even move away from the Keychron K6 now. Since it has the option to switch back and forth between Mac and Windows layouts.

Here are the results of a typing test after two months of using the Keychron K6.

It’s actually quite impressive how much I have improved with that keyboard. In the grand scheme of things I am still relatively slow at typing, but at the very least I’ve actually managed to significantly increase my overall typing speed, which means I am comfortable typing on this keyboard now.

Gaming

These types of keyboards are often also touted to be great for gaming right? Let’s be honest though, I am absolutely the wrong person to even give an opinion about that. I have never even understood why movement is supposed to be done with wasd instead of esdf, which makes a lot more sense to me, but whatever. Not to mention I don’t really play any games where that would even come into practice. Instead I am just gonna try it with a game that I actually play.

Guilty Gear Strive

I was quite surprised to be honest. I play on Hitbox, right? And ergonomically speaking, the keyboard doesn’t feel all that great, yet. That is mostly due to me not being used to playing the game on a keyboard. The inputs however, feel insanely fast and with that I am referring to responsiveness, to the point where I had to start slowing down my inputs, so they wouldn’t all like to blur together. As you don’t have as much travel for each finger between keys and the keys on top of that requiring a lot less force than the 24mm Sanwa buttons, yeah this is pretty nuts. I am honestly kinda burned out on Guilty Gear Strive, however, trying to learn the game on keyboard might be an interesting little side-project. But yeah, long story short, while I am not going to be doing this most likely, you can definitely play Guilty Gear pretty damn well on this.

Closing word

I think until Diablo 4 comes out, I won’t really be using this keyboard much for games, but given the short amount of time I have had with the K6, I am very happy with it. I do still prefer my MacBook Pro’s internal keyboard, but in time that might change as well. It’s still a little exhausting to write on this, but it sounds fun and the typing experience overall is really nice. Which keyboards do you use? Let me know in the comments, either here or on the YouTube video. See you next time!