Review: Matias Laptop Pro is a retro-good keyboard in a compact package
Matias has long been known for its excellent Tactile Pro Keyboards (; $150), now in their third generation. For many people, the Tactile Pro is the closest you can get to Apple’s venerable—but long discontinued—Extended Keyboard, thanks to Alps mechanical key switches that require a decent amount of force to press but that repay the effort with excellent tactile response and the visceral, clacky sound of a “real” keyboard.
Last year, the company expanded its product line with the similarly priced Quiet Pro Keyboard for Mac (), a model that looks just like the Tactile Pro but uses specially modified mechanical switches that make much less—though still some—noise. (See our review of the Quiet Pro for all the details.)
But for many Mac users, both the Tactile Pro and the Quiet Pro present a couple challenges. First, they’re both huge as keyboards go. In a market where Apple and many other vendors have done their best to make keyboards as compact as possible, Matias’s offerings remain unabashedly thick, wide, and heavy, with a full complement of keys, including a numeric keypad. Second, while more and more peripherals have gone wireless, the Tactile and Quiet Pro are still tethered to your Mac via USB.
Matias’s latest offering, the $170 Laptop Pro keyboard, answers these challenges by being considerably smaller than its siblings and by connecting using Bluetooth. However, it’s still, at its heart, a Matias keyboard, with mechanical key switches—the “quiet” ones found in the Quiet Pro—and a characteristically chunky design.
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