Show HN: I spent 2 years designing a mechanical Magic Keyboard

I don't understand the overwhelming praise. This product is just bizarre. Who is this for?

What's with the giant numbers and tiny symbols? I know where the numbers are from muscle memory. I don't have the symbols memorized.

Haptic feedback when you use the command key? Why?

No number pad or page up/page dn, which would be something useful.

This is like The Homer of keyboards. Does it play La Cucaracha out of the speaker if you push the knob four times?

You clearly have the technical capabilities but the product requirements are bonkers.

I am a big fan of the original Altar. I like that you’ve been trying new things with that design like the novel keycap profile.

The switches look like cherry ultra low profile switches. I’ve not tried these out, how do they feel compared to the linear kailh choc v1’s you used before.

Out of curiosity, what exactly is a "fully mechanical scissor switch"? And is this the first such switch on the market? If I search for other such products I can only find "metal scissor switch over rubber dome" style.

What is the weight?

Everything lives on the keyboard itself. The app just configures files on the device, basically. The keyboard also works without the app of course. This approach has the added benefit of making your configuration portable. For example if you remap your dial, and move to a different computer, your remapped dial will persist.

There are a couple of small quality-of-life features that do require the app: for example if you want haptic feedback when you receive a notification. This is because the keyboard has no idea what is happening on your OS, and requires some middleware. But all the core functionality requires no app at all.

To answer your second question, the firmware for Altar II will be open-sourced, as the firmware for our Altar I keyboard is. You can see the Altar I firmware source code here: https://github.com/electronicmaterialsoffice/firmware-altar-...

Both Altar I and Altar II firmware are based on the open-source ZMK (https://zmk.dev). We try to contribute back to ZMK whenever we can because we have benefitted so much from it. Two members of our team are also long-standing ZMK contributors.