Gadgetory

this video is brought to you by our trusted graphics partner Nvidia welcome to my unboxing and first look at the SteelSeries apex raw gaming keyboard this is also the first unboxing that we're doing in our all-new steel series themed gaming den set that we're going to be using for steel series unboxings as well as steel series product videos showing you everything that there is to know about their products which are somehow different from unboxings in a certain way that is different alright so let's start with what they have to say for themselves about this designed for quick reflexes this is a low profile keyboard meaning that the keys don't need to be pressed down as far in order to actuate them it does use membrane key switches rather than mechanical key switches but given the price this should pretty much be expected it has raised macro keys and we're going to show you how this is used for fast key combinations as well as a brilliant white backlight with eight different levels of brightness other than that I pretty much know everything else there is to know about this keyboard having already looked at all this stuff so let's go ahead and get it open so steel series has a plain black box with a black mat inside and then once you open it up you find pretty much the keyboard itself in a plastic sleeve which I am having a great amount of difficulty removing and there we go that's my big effort that's like you know some kind of combo that I unlocked it's like the plastic removal and put the product down combo there we go okay we've also got a Quick Start Guide which should be pretty much plug the thing into the thing although they might give you a few little instructions about how to use the software that's included because there's some neat functionality in there and last but not least you've got a couple of rubber feet that can be used to adjust the angle of the keyboard so those just come in a little ziploc bag here so we're going to go ahead and put that behind it and show you guys first the bottom of the keyboard and there was a cat incident so yes alright so on the bottom you've got these two rubber feet that do not move and then you've got these two here which can be removed just by popping them off and then you can plug a new one into it to give the keyboard more of an angle compared to if you don't plug it in so there you go you can see that raises it about two meter or so maybe a little bit more than a centimeter and that's pretty much it for the bottom of the keyboard other than that it's well a keyboard so let's move on to the top layout wise I'm so happy to see SteelSeries has not committed any cardinal sins as I like to call them in terms of the layout long Shift key long enter long backspace and I love to see that macro keys are also sort of uniquely positioned on this particular keyboard in that they are here on the left where we've seen them many many times and they are also that that data above all of the F keys this is for a number of reasons so the ones here are because when you're on the WASD Keys which are you know pretty much the most common gaming Keys you can reach this you can reach this you can kind of reach this you definitely can't reach another row over and we've seen keyboards with as many as two or three banks of keys they're past two it gets a little bit on the impractical side these ones up here are meant for people who often use their F keys for binding abilities or whatever else so what you can do is you can either hit a macro key and you can actually see I'll give you guys a better angle here you can see that the macro key is raised significantly above the F key this allows you to feel where the macro key is without actually activating either of the buttons or you can actually program the keys to do a particular thing and then a particular thing so you can actually hit a couple of them one two or even three buttons as a as a combination move so this could be like you know fire one bank of missiles fire two fire all of them because we're stuffs getting real so go for it so that's really neat so there's five here twelve here for a total of 17 macro buttons and you can use the l1 or the l2 buttons to switch the functionality so you can have an unlimited number of profiles within the SteelSeries engine software and then you can have two layers of macro functionality per profile another really cool thing I mean this is the one of the things they'd actually don't talk about that much in the marketing but I think is really cool is you can completely reprogram any key on the keyboard to do pretty much whatever you want you don't have to leave it the way it is stock so you can see SteelSeries has relocated the Windows key from the right to the left and the SteelSeries key from the left to the right you can see my older 7d here has a SteelSeries key on the left and a Windows key on the right so according to the feedback they've gotten people want the steal or they want the Windows key back on the left so they've gone ahead and done that now this is an ergonomic thing that slick diesel and I all agreed on when we saw this keyboard in the SteelSeries suite and that is this longer spacebar so I'm going to try and give you guys a good look at this I have two different feet on it right now so don't worry it doesn't normally do that but there you go so what this does is when you're typing a short space bar is fine it doesn't make any difference because you rest just the the side of your thumb on the key however when you're gaming you're much more likely to end up in a situation where you have your thumb resting down like this because you're not sitting on the home row you're actually a little bit further up than that so what this does is it's it's it's just meant to be a more natural way to press the spacebar without actually interfering with normal typing so I think that's a pretty cool little thing as well and moving right along oh yeah I should probably show you guys just the overall design of the keyboard I mean I talked about how it's low profile but it has sort of a cool low profile shape to it as well so I'll do my traditional iPhone size comparison although with the ht1 HTC One coming soon I might be doing away with that pretty soon so at its thinnest point it's actually a little thinner than an iPhone 4 and then at the thickest point up on the top it is significantly thicker than an iPhone 4 so it has kind of a curvy is sort of angular angular shape to it overall you can actually see I'll show you guys right here up close if you want to see how much the buttons actually need to be depressed that is not to say sad but pressed down in order to actuate them one thing I missed about the layout is they've added little bumps on the W key so this allows you to more easily find your way back to them I personally don't find something like that that helpful because my landmarks are usually more to do with the positioning of my spacebar and my shift and then I can find my way back to the WASD but if you have trouble finding it in the dark then that's something that you can definitely benefit from now I'm going to go ahead and plug it in and we'll be back in a moment so there are only a few things that are really left we've got it plugged in now you can see the backlight but we're going to turn the lights off to show it to you in more detail so the SteelSeries key is used to control backlight brightness as well as your media keys volume up volume down all that good stuff and they have riad 'add the diagonal keys over here so they had taken them away on some keyboard and then a bunch of people are upset so they have now brought them back if you wanted the diagonal Keys back then now you have them it does support up to 20 simultaneous button presses which is sort of an anti ghosting type feature that prevents you from accidentally triggering random extra events which is what ghosting actually refers to most gaming keyboards do have this feature but 20 is pretty aggressive especially for a USB model and one thing that's kind of cool about it as well is they have reduced the width of the keyboard a little bit by narrowing the gaps that you usually find between the three different groupings of keys on the keyboard itself so it makes it still have a very large layout so you've still got extra keys at the top and on the side but without being sort of extraordinarily wide like something like a g15 gen1 which is sort of like that that first weird sort of lots of macros gaming keyboard all that I'd like that screen on the top and all that the wrist rest is a little bit longer than usual so when you're resting on the home row you're going to find yourself right around here so there you go I personally find that more comfortable it's one of the things I like about the 7g and just like about a lot of the other keyboards that are out there is very very short wrist rests and I think that pretty much wraps it up so I'm going to run around and turn off some lights and we'll show you guys the eight different levels of backlighting that are available on it there's still a window open so there's still some light in here but we're going to go ahead and step it down one by one so it still built it's off now there we go and I think that's pretty much it thank you for checking out my unboxing and first look at the SteelSeries apex raw don't forget to subscribe - tech tips from unboxings reviews and other computer videos