A keyboard for uncompromising typists

We spend our days at a keyboard. Most of our nights, too. The keyboard is how we practice our craft. Something even a little bit more comfortable makes a world of difference. Something even a little bit better designed will help us be happier and more productive.

The Model 01 is the best keyboard we can make. It's not like other keyboards. We mill the Model 01's enclosure from two blocks of solid maple that are a joy to rest your hands on. Instead of shallow, uncomfortable keyswitches, we use gloriously tactile mechanical keyswitches similar to those found on classic Macs. We've custom-sculpted each of the 64 individual keycaps on the Model 01 to gently guide your fingers to the right keys. After putting it all together, the result is a keyboard that is a pleasure to type on all day and all night.

Heirloom-grade construction

The first thing you'll notice when you look at the Model 01 is that it doesn't look like any keyboard you've ever seen.

We precision-mill the Model 01 out of two blocks of maple. It's hard to convey in writing just how good it feels to rest your hands on the Model 01. In a lot of ways, it feels more like a musical instrument than a computer peripheral.

Each keyboard is milled from solid maple

Once you get your hands on a polished maple Model 01, you won't want to go back to another flat, plastic box.

A key layout based on your fingers

There's an old keyboard-nerd joke that goes something like this: "If alien archeologists landed on Earth a million years from now and tried to figure out what we looked like based on our keyboards, they'd probably figure that we had 10 tentacles coming out of our chests." The traditional staggered QWERTY layout was not designed for humans.

Model 01 keyboard layout — We designed the Model 01's layout to make it easier to reach the keys you use most

That being said, it's important to us that the Model 01 not feel too alien today. That's why we've based the default key layout on QWERTY. We've made some important changes, though: We've aligned the keys in columns so they're easier to reach without having to contort your fingers. The two halves of the keyboard are angled to help you keep your wrists in a more natural, neutral position.

If you've ever used a smartphone, you know that your thumbs are good for more than just whacking a big spacebar. The Model 01 moves some of the most frequently chorded keys away from your poor, overworked pinkie fingers to comfortable arcs right under your thumbs.

Underneath the thumb arcs, you'll see one of the Model 01's signature features: a palm key.

Dropping the base of your thumb onto it turns the H, J, K, and L keys into your arrow keys, turns the number keys into F-keys and even turns the WASD keys into a high-precision mouse.

The Model 01 ships with a QWERTY layout, but it also speaks Dvorak and Colemak. It is, of course, easily customizable, so you'll be able to make it speak your layout.

Yes, it has an "Any" key. No, we have no idea what it's supposed to do. But we bet you do.

It adjusts to fit your hands and your desk

Out of the box, the Model 01 provides a pretty comfortable experience for the vast majority of people who've tried it. However, your hands and your work setup aren't necessarily the same as ours, so we've designed the Model 01 to be easy for you to adjust and customize. The two halves of the keyboard are joined together by a center bar. Your Model 01 comes with both a flat bar and a "tented" bar, as well as a pair of adjustable stands.

We like adjustability. Your keyboard should fit you, not the other way around

The most standard configuration of the Model 01 places the two halves of the keyboard flat on your desk. If you're not used to an ergonomic keyboard or plan to use the Model 01 on your lap, the flat configuration will feel most natural to you.
The tented center bar angles the two halves of the Model 01 slightly up in the middle. (It looks a little like a tent, which is where this configuration gets its name.) If you've been typing on an ergonomic keyboard like the Microsoft Natural keyboard, the tented configuration should be comfortable and familiar to you.
You can position the two halves of the keyboard shoulder-width apart on your desk for a sublimely comfortable typing experience. (We've actually tested putting the two halves up to 15 feet apart and everything works just great. We just don't know anybody with arms that long.)
Each half of the keyboard features a standard 1/4-20 camera tripod mount, perfect for building a custom keyboard stand.

The shiny stuff: Fully programmable LEDs

Individually programmable LEDs glow underneath each key

Each key has an individually programmable RGB LED. Out of the box, the Model 01 can breathe, glow and do cute rainbow fade animations with the best of them, but the neat part is that each and every one of those LEDs is end-user controllable.

Sculpted keycaps to guide your fingers

We designed new keycaps to help you type

Most computer keyboard designs use at most 4 or 5 different key shapes–just one for each row. Our design goes to eleven... er, 64. Most keyboard manufacturers buy their keycaps from one of a handful of keycap makers. It took hundreds of hours of engineering, but we designed our keycaps from scratch.

We sculpted the Model 01's keycaps to gently guide your fingers to the correct places, making it just a little bit easier to hit the right key with the right finger. While this feels great if you already touch-type, it's also dramatically reduced the Model 01's learning curve for those of us who never learned "proper" typing in school.

High-quality mechanical keyswitches

Keyswitches are the soul of a keyboard. More and more, over the last 20 years, computer keyboards have lost their soul.

Typing on the Model 01 feels great, whether you're using all ten fingers or just one

Way back when, typing on a keyboard actually felt good. You'd press a key and you could feel a nice, satisfying, mechanical click. As computers got more and more popular, manufacturers started cutting corners. Mechanical keyswitches were replaced with little rubber domes or plastic scissor mechanisms. Rather than registering when you'd pressed them about halfway down like "real" keyswitches, you have to slam your fingers into the keyboard to make them work. To add insult to injury, they don't even feel that nice to type on.

The Model 01 features Quiet Click keyswitches designed in Canada by Edgar Matias. Starting from the design of the ALPS keyswitches used in some of Apple's most legendary keyboards from the last century, Matias reengineered them to slide more smoothly when pressed from just about any angle and to be quiet enough to use in a meeting. They're still satisfyingly tactile with a delightfully clicky feel when pressed.

True N-key rollover (NKRO)

For a variety of reasons, many USB keyboards limit you to pressing 6 keys (plus modifiers) at once. Most of us would never notice this limitation, but an intrepid few really, really need to be able to hit more than six keys at once.

If you need NKRO, we've got you covered on Windows, macOS, and Linux without any special drivers.

The learning curve

We're not going to beat around the bush. The Model 01 is not for everybody. If you don't already touch type on a split keyboard with the keys arranged in columns, expect some frustration as you come up to speed on the Model 01. Typically, most typists start to get acclimated to a new key layout like ours within a few hours, but true mastery of a new key layout is an investment that can take a month or two to really start to pay off.

Anybody who buys the Model 01 should know that there’s an adjustment period. Plan to work on it full time for about a week or two weeks before you get really used to the new layout. It's going to be a little slow and a little frustrating at first, but it’s worthwhile in the end for the long term benefits.

– Gina Trapani (@ginatrapani), Model 01 beta tester

Arduino makes customization easy

We've built the Model 01 around the same ATmega32U4 microcontroller that Arduino uses in the Arduino Leonardo. You can update your keyboard from the Arduino IDE. If you want to make your keyboard do something special, there are thousands of Arduino resources online to help you out

If that sort of thing isn't your cup of tea, don't worry about it. You don't need to know anything about electronics or embedded programming to use the Model 01. It's a keyboard. You can just take it out of the box, plug it in and start typing.

Source code and a screwdriver

We believe, quite strongly, that you own the things you buy from us. You are 100% welcome to open your keyboard up, flash its firmware, reflash its bootloader, solder weird connectors onto the circuit boards or flash our firmware onto something else. To make all of this as easy as possible for you, your Model 01 will ship with a screwdriver, firmware & bootloader source code.

You may never need any of that, but when you want it, it'll be there waiting for you.

Tech specs

Dimensions: 230mm x 360mm x 25mm
Weight: 1.3kg
Keycaps: 64 black-painted, laser engraved keycaps
Keyswitches: Matias Quiet Click ALPS-mount keyswitches
Keyswitch lifetime: 50 million presses
LEDs: APA 102C LEDs
Microcontroller: Microchip ATmega32U4
Interface: USB
Compatibility: OS X, Linux, Windows, Android (Limited LED support with phones and tablets)
Minimum power draw: 30 mA (no LEDs)
Maximum power draw: 500 mA/1600mA (Software configurable)

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