This morning i read the first review by Engadget of Art Lebedev’s superduper keyboard the Optimus Maximus. Their conclusion is that the Optimus Maximus looks great and is absurdly configurable. There is one minor snag though. Typing sucks.

“Okay, why does typing on the Optimus suck, you ask? Well, although the keyboard uses mechanical switches and a lot of high quality components (evident when we pulled off some keys), and there is some clicky tactility to keypresses, as a whole it just requires way too much force to depress keys. And the larger the key, the more force is required, so enter is easier than space, but harder than tab. Let’s put it this way, we sit around and type all day long and this thing wore us out in about 30 seconds to a minute. Carpal sufferers, beware.“

The stupid thing is that i would still love to have one, it is the sexiest chunk of plastic i have seen in my life.

I can’t think of any good reason to buy myself an Optimus Maximus. But i can think of one good reason to not buy one. I’m just not worthy for something that is so perfect. Coming to think of it, something so beautiful should not be for sale at all. It should be on display in a museum. Behind bulletproof glass. Only viewable for the public on every second sunday of the month.

The creators of the Optimus Maximus maintain a blog where they write about the design of their product. Everything, including the packaging gets covered there. Strangely enough, the blog is one of the ugliest i have seen in my life.

UPDATE: for $460,- you get a keyboard with only one active key. If you want to have the real thing, you need to cough up a little more: $1564.37. That sounds a lot more reasonable.

Links: The Optimus Maximus blog, The Optimus Maximus website