the mx keys mini in rose, or the first thing i bought for the job i wanted

The offer letter came on a wednesday and by saturday I was standing in a store holding a keyboard in rose, which is a pink so dusty and calm it should come with a warning label for people who just got their first big job. I had a folding table, a desk chair from facebook marketplace, and a paycheck with a comma in it for the first time. I did not need a keyboard. The laptop has one. I bought the keyboard.

That was the first thing the new career bought, and this is what it has done since.

the honest bit, including the folding table era

I paid $99.99 plus tax for the mx keys mini in rose, full price, march 2022, because the sale prices had not found me yet and I was emotionally unavailable to wait. The board list-prices at $99.99 and drifts down to the sixty and seventy dollar range constantly, so if you buy it full price, you and me, we are in a support group that meets at noon.

what i actually care about, in order of care

The keys are dished like little spoons and the typing is the reason to buy it. Low profile scissor switches, spongy but quick, and the whole board is quiet enough that I can write a post at 11pm next to a sleeping dog. There is a softness to the press that mechanical people will call mushy and I call forgiveness. My words per minute did not change. My willingness to sit down and write did, which is worth more.

The backlight is a porch light. There is a sensor and the keys light up as your hands approach, dimming and brightening with the room, so at 11pm in a dark living room the thing glows up to meet you before you touch it. I have caught myself standing over the desk just watching it happen. It is a very small magic trick and I am not tired of it after four years.

Three devices, one physical button. The easy-switch row up top walks the keyboard between my macbook, the windows laptop my job issues, and the ipad air in its case by the bed. No re-pairing ceremony, no bluetooth menu archaeology, just a press and a half second. This is a smaller version of a thing I said about the mouse, but it bears repeating: gear that switches quietly removes one tiny wall between you and starting.

The battery is the honest complaint. With the backlight on, logitech rates it around 10 days, and that matches my life: charge it sunday nights while dinner happens. Kill the backlight and it goes for months, but the backlight is the soul of the board and I refuse. usb-c, same cable as everything. The battery widget on my desktop does cause me a small weekly emotion, so you should know that going in.

It is 75 percent of a keyboard and I do not miss the rest. No number pad, and I have typed exactly zero spreadsheets that could not survive without one. The arrows are full size, the f-row is real, and the whole thing is small enough to live sideways next to the laptop in a tote. My desk gained back a stripe of empty space, and the empty stripe has a candle on it now.

The price is the asterisk. Ninety nine dollars is mechanical-keyboard money, and every keyboard forum on earth will tell you that for the same money you can have a clacky little machine with better switches and more software freedom, and they are right, and I have heard them, and I still want this one. This is a quiet low-profile office board for people who write and do not want the desk to sound like a kitchen. If you want sound, buy sound. I wanted silence and rose.

the keyboard drawer, a tangent

I own a drawer of old keyboards and I cannot explain myself. The $11 one from college that clacked like a geiger counter. A white apple one with half the letters worn off from that year I wrote a whole novel draft on the bus. One from the print shop days, still sticky, that I keep out of loyalty to the version of me who learned indesign on it. When I packed for the pivot, everything I owned fit in a hatchback except the desk chair, and I sat on the floor of the new apartment with no desk and no job yet and ordered this keyboard, and when it arrived in rose I put it on a folding table and it looked like a desk. It looked like a person lived there and made things.

The lesson is not "buy a keyboard when you are sad." The lesson is that one object can be a flag you plant. Mine is pink and cost a hundred dollars and it was worth every cent.

the soft landing

I keep meaning to learn two of the programmable smart keys, the ones I assigned at setup and forgot, and every time I open the options app I get distracted renaming things instead of

The truest thing: this board typed the first post on this site and it has typed every one since, in the dark, lighting up before my hands land, and that is four years of porch light for a hundred dollars.

type the thing

ava