Keychron K1 Max keyboard – a personal review

My Keychron K1 Max with optional Light Gray and White keycaps (sold separately)

I’d been having wrist pain from typing on my computer. The pain affected the base of my pinky and the pinky side of my left wrist and occurred after as little as one hour of typing, especially if I had to use my little finger a lot (Alt+Tab, Esc, Tab). While the pain never reached levels that would require painkillers, it became quite a drag on my life. I started adapting to my disability – I learned to click around instead of pressing Esc or Tab and even remapped one of my mouse buttons to Alt+Tab. I started severely limiting my typing time. These strategies reduced the problem, but didn’t solve it. Anytime I spent more than one hour typing, the pain would come back and the only way to make it go away was to take a forced 1-2 day vacation from typing.

For too long, I put off trying to tackle the problem on the hardware side. Call me stupid, but I had a decent keyboard – a mechanical gaming keyboard with the very popular Cherry MX Brown switches – so I didn’t really think it was at fault. But there came a point when I started thinking: what if I replaced it with something that required a lighter touch, more like a laptop keyboard? So I picked a keyboard which had very short “key travel” (how far the keys move) and very little actuation force – the Keychron K1 Max with red low-profile switches.

As soon as I switched to the new keyboard, the pain was gone – as if by magic! Yes, I had to re-train my fingers to use a much lighter touch, but that’s hardly worth mentioning next to the fact that I could type and program again, pretty much without limits. What a joy!

So, for me, the Keychron K1 Max is a miracle cure which gave me a new lease of life for computer work. But that probably doesn’t apply to you, Dear Reader. So now let’s talk about this keyboard in a more objective way.

What is it?

Stock Keychron K1 Max. Even with the orange Enter key (included in the box) it felt a bit drab, so I splurged on the white/gray keycaps shown above.

The Keychron K1 Max is a TKL (tenkeyless) low-profile mechanical keyboard. It uses low-profile Gateron switches (you can pick red, brown or blue – I picked the reds because I was going for the lightest touch possible).

The switches can be replaced, but only if you buy the “hot-swappable” version of the keyboard. I think it’s a good idea to go for that option, as it allows you to try different switches if the default ones are not to your liking. For what it’s worth, the included reds are generally considered OK, but not amazing.

The keyboard can be either wired or wireless and it supports two kinds of wireless – Bluetooth or the included 2.4 GHz dongle. The 2.4 GHz dongle is supposed to be the low-latency option suitable for both work and gaming.

The findings in this review should apply to other Keychron Kn Max keyboards which use low-profile switches – those would be the odd-numbered model numbers, such as the K3 Max or the K5 Max. Even-numbered Kn Maxes are slightly larger and use standard, high-profile switches, so the problems described here may not affect them.

Double-typing issue

Now we come to the first problem that I’ve encountered: After about 6 months of using the keyboard, one of my switches (letter S) developed an issue where it would occasionally register two keypresses instead of one. Shortly after, the R key started failing in the same way.

The fact that it happened to two different switches after only 6 months of using the keyboard tells me that it was no accident. In my opinion, the switches (at least the Gateron reds) are not reliable. This is all the more shocking because it has never happened to any of the dozens of cheap PC keyboards that I’ve used over 30 years of my history with computers. I’ve had keyboards get stiff or mushy with age, but all the keys still basically worked.

Now what are the options if this happens to you? You can try to clean the faulty switch with compressed air – it seemed to work for one of the defective keys on my keyboard, but I have no idea if the fix would have lasted). If you bought the version without hot-swappable switches, that’s basically it. You can submit a warranty claim and hope that Keychron replaces your entire keyboard.

If you bought the hot-swappable version, you can easily replace the offending switch. However, the keyboard does not come with any spare switches and Keychron.com support will not send you spares, though your local Keychron distributor might. I lucked out – the official Polish distributor of Keychron products is based in my city, so I was able to drive to their office with the keyboard. After a nice conversation with a repair technician, I walked out with a few spare switches and a spare 2.4 GHz receiver (see below for why I needed that). I am not sure it would have gone nearly as quickly for someone from another city or country.

If your (hot-swappable) Keychron is out of warranty, you can also buy sets of Gateron switches ($30 for 110 switches) and replace the defective switches yourself. Though, if you’re going to spend all that money, you might as well upgrade to better switches.

Typing feel and sound

I’ve mentioned that the red Gateron switches on the K1 Max react to the slightest touch. In fact, whenever you’re not sure if you really pressed a key, you can just assume the answer is “yes”, and you’ll be right 100% of the time (which is actually a useful property).

I’m sure you can find dozens of YouTube videos that demonstrate what the keyboard sounds like, so I won’t post one of my own. I will just say that I’ve found the K1 Max pretty satisfying to type on, both haptically and acoustically. The Gateron Reds are linear switches, so – according to conventional wisdom – they are supposed to be more suited for gaming than for typing. My old keyboard had Cherry MX Browns, which are classified as tactile (so, in theory, more suited for typing than pure linear switches). Yet during my time with the Keychron, not once did I miss my old keyboard or feel that the typing experience was somehow lacking. Quite the opposite.

Recently, I bought aftermarket Gateron Cowberry switches (available from the Nuphy store), mostly out of curiosity, and yes – they are better than the Reds. They have a deeper, more “thocky” sound, which many find desirable – though personally I could take it or leave it. The main benefit for me is that they don’t react to the slightest touch, which makes typing more comfortable. They’re still light-touch switches, so if you’re coming from a stiffer keyboard, you will need to adjust. Since (as of October 2025) I’ve only had the Cowberries for two months, I cannot say how reliable they are. I hope they won’t develop the same double-typing issue. If they do, I will be sure to update this review.

Glitchy 2.4 GHz connectivity

The Keychron K1 Max will occasionally miss “keyup” keystrokes when operating in 2.4 GHz mode with the included USB receiver. Normally, when you press a key, a keyboard sends a keydown event, and then when you release it, it sends a keyup event. If the keyup event is missed, the OS thinks that the key is being held down. For example, I’ll press the down arrow key and, instead of going down by one line, the caret races to the end of the document. This is not very frequent – it happens once every couple of days on average. As far as I’ve been able to tell, the issue does not occur in wired mode.

I’ve tried several things to remedy the problem: I’ve placed the receiver at a ridiculously short distance (30 cm) from the keyboard (with direct line of sight). I’ve upgraded the firmware on both the keyboard and the receiver. None of these things made any difference. If you’re thinking electromagnetic interference, consider that my wireless Logitech mouse (also 2.4 GHz) has been working without a hitch for the past year or so. So, what would your conclusion be? Mine is that the fine folk at Keychron simply messed up, perhaps because 2.4 GHz is a new feature on their keyboards.

If we’re talking about principles, this sort of unreliability is absolutely unacceptable. However, practically speaking, the problem occurs rarely enough that it doesn’t seem to bother me that much. I suppose I’m content with knowing I could fix it at any time by connecting the keyboard with a USB cable.

RGB lighting is not shine-through

Yes, the Keychron K1 Max has highly customizable RGB lighting with motion effects, if you care about that sort of thing. I don’t, but sometimes I do like my key labels to be lit when I’m working at night, and so I was disappointed to note that this keyboard does not have shine-through keycaps. I almost couldn’t believe my eyes when I first turned it on, but all the light simply leaks around the edges of keys while the labels stay completely dark – I couldn’t come up with a better example of a gimmick if I tried. What’s worse, I believe you cannot buy shine-through keycaps for it, at least not from Keychron.

I’ve simply turned RGB lighting off completely and accepted the fact that, unlike with my previous keyboard, I will have to rely on muscle memory and the printed key labels.

Layout customization

The Keychron K1 Max uses open-source QMK firmware and can be extensively configured using the Keychron Launcher Web app. You can remap every single key on the keyboard. There are four layers (i.e. each key can do 4 different things depending on the state of the keyboard) and you can assign any key to be a modifier that switches to another layer. For example, you could make it so that when you hold Fn, WASD keys act like arrows, so you could move the cursor without taking your fingers off the home row. The beauty in that is that everything is done in hardware (or actually, in the software that’s running on the keyboard), so you don’t need any app to be running on your computer for the customizations to work.

Maybe it’s my lack of imagination, but I have struggled to find a compelling use for key remapping. I don’t want to override any shortcuts with the Alt, Ctrl or Windows keys. The only modifier that’s not used by the OS is Fn, but that’s hard to reach. I think custom shortcuts would be much more useful if the keyboard had a shorter spacebar and an extra modifier key that you could easily press with your thumb.

Conclusions

The Keychron K1 Max is a product with significant flaws. I put up with it because it seems to be the only TKL keyboard with low-profile mechanical switches (manufacturers seem to favor the 75% layout, which is one step too far for me). You should most likely look elsewhere first, but if your tendons ache after long typing sessions, do yourself a favor and try this keyboard or another one with similar characteristics. It might solve your problem.