"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: entoday we're talking about a new keyboard no we're talking about the Apex m800 from steel series The Still series Apex m800 is a customizable mechanical gaming keyboard and it works with the Mac it actually has Mac Centric keys that come with it that you can pop on there it comes with two USB cables because it has a built-in USB 2.0 Hub which isn't that great but we'll talk about that later you have a couple of extra rubber feet that can pop on or pop off just like that and you get these key caps these Mac Centric key caps that can replace some of the windows Centric keys that are on the keyboard now as mentioned you have a USB hub that's only USB 2.0 which is kind of lame um USB 3.0 would have been much nicer but here is the keyboard pretty good build quality it is all plastic at this price range it would have been nice to at least partly use a different material maybe in combination with the plastic but overall solid build and as I stated the key caps can pop off they don't make the the best sound when you pop them off at least initially but you can put them back on pretty easily without any tools these mechanical switches aren't your popular Sherry switches that you know many mechanical keyboards use these are still series on proprietary qs1 switches and they feel very similar to The sheram X Brown switches so if you like the Sherm X Brown the way those feel how quiet the key switches are then you're probably going to like these qs1 switches they are proprietary meaning you can't mix and match key caps from Sherm max keyboards with these but you know that's just part of the part of the deal with this uh Apex m800 keyboard but as you see there lighting plays a big role in this keyboard as does macros and customizing this keyboard can be customized to a ridiculous degree and that is really what makes this so impressive you can use the steel series engine 3 app which I'm running right here to fully customize this keyboard you can customize both key bindings and illumination and each key has its own LED light behind center right under the key cap so you're going to get some high quality LED lights there but as I mentioned you have key bindings which are for customizing the key functionality and then illumination so illumination and key bindings keep that in mind that is what you can configure and customize with this keyboard so you see I already have some customization uh these macro Keys you get six macro keys on the left side of the keyboard and I already have these assigned to do certain things like that first one zero I have that set up to create a screenshot just with one press of a key just like that I'm just pressing it over and over and you see all the screenshots being created immediately so that is extremely cool and as you see here I have one key set up to launch and switch to Final Cut Pro I have another key set to launch and switch to logic pro uh so here's Final Cut number one and if I press number two you're going to see logic pro launch here and then I could just quickly switch between those applications and that's just the start that's just the very beginning you can customize this to just an insane degree pretty much do anything you want with any of the keys on the keyboard not just the macro Keys here um but pretty much any sort of functionality you can think to assign you can record your own macros uh you can use OS system level shortcuts you can uh just reassign a key to a different key if you want to and then there's the illumination and this is really impressive as well because there's just a ridiculous amount of customization that you can do like I said each key has its own LED light and you can change individual keys so say you only wanted one key to have a light you could do that if you wanted to and not only does it have a full color palette you can actually put in hexadecimal values and get exact colors that you're looking for for individual keys or you can as I shown you here you can select all keys it's sort of almost like Photoshop for your keyboard I mean you're literally um just dragging and selecting Keys you can copy and paste key uh color values between Keys um you can set up almost like gradients here's a breathe effect so it will transition between the different gradients sort of like Photoshop gradients um and it's just really impressive what you're able to do with this on the Fly and you can see the changes happen immediately as you see here so this is the breathe effect which basically transitions between the colors selected on the timeline that you set up there um and you can set that up with as many colors as you want and change them to any color that you want uh let's look at some other effects here all right so we have this effect and of course these are all built-in effects and you can go in and change the colors if you want there's also some additional templates that you can set up so disco mode let's try that so here's disco mode of course this is ridiculously distracting but cool nonetheless uh and that's just like I said the tip of the iceberg you can set individual keys if you want to select individual keys using the pointer you can drag and select multiple Keys you can use an dropper tool to copy values from one key to another and of course you can go in and disable illumination for all keys and then go in and select an individual key and say hey for instance how about our Final Cut Pro um macro that we have set up here or shortcut so I'm just going to choose steady for that first one and that's sort of the color for the Final Cut Pro icon number one I'm going to choose this one and here's the color for the logic pro icon so that's easily identifiable on the screen using those macros so one is uh final cut to is logic sort of the colors of the app icons themselves so that's pretty much it folks there's of course lots more that you can go in and customize with relation to macros and key customization and bindings and colors but let me show you this because this is important it would be ridiculous for me to talk about this keyboard without at least letting you hear how the keys sound when you press them so if you're familiar with the Sherry MX switches that you get uh the Sher MX Brown switches that you get on some mechanical keyboards it sounds similar and it feels similar when you type on it it's not a super loud click like the Blue switches um it's sort of a subdued uh tactile response of course but not overly loud not going to annoy the wife or the kids or anything or the dog for that matter so folks let me know what you guys think Down Below in the comments section this is Jeff with 9 to-5 Mactoday we're talking about a new keyboard no we're talking about the Apex m800 from steel series The Still series Apex m800 is a customizable mechanical gaming keyboard and it works with the Mac it actually has Mac Centric keys that come with it that you can pop on there it comes with two USB cables because it has a built-in USB 2.0 Hub which isn't that great but we'll talk about that later you have a couple of extra rubber feet that can pop on or pop off just like that and you get these key caps these Mac Centric key caps that can replace some of the windows Centric keys that are on the keyboard now as mentioned you have a USB hub that's only USB 2.0 which is kind of lame um USB 3.0 would have been much nicer but here is the keyboard pretty good build quality it is all plastic at this price range it would have been nice to at least partly use a different material maybe in combination with the plastic but overall solid build and as I stated the key caps can pop off they don't make the the best sound when you pop them off at least initially but you can put them back on pretty easily without any tools these mechanical switches aren't your popular Sherry switches that you know many mechanical keyboards use these are still series on proprietary qs1 switches and they feel very similar to The sheram X Brown switches so if you like the Sherm X Brown the way those feel how quiet the key switches are then you're probably going to like these qs1 switches they are proprietary meaning you can't mix and match key caps from Sherm max keyboards with these but you know that's just part of the part of the deal with this uh Apex m800 keyboard but as you see there lighting plays a big role in this keyboard as does macros and customizing this keyboard can be customized to a ridiculous degree and that is really what makes this so impressive you can use the steel series engine 3 app which I'm running right here to fully customize this keyboard you can customize both key bindings and illumination and each key has its own LED light behind center right under the key cap so you're going to get some high quality LED lights there but as I mentioned you have key bindings which are for customizing the key functionality and then illumination so illumination and key bindings keep that in mind that is what you can configure and customize with this keyboard so you see I already have some customization uh these macro Keys you get six macro keys on the left side of the keyboard and I already have these assigned to do certain things like that first one zero I have that set up to create a screenshot just with one press of a key just like that I'm just pressing it over and over and you see all the screenshots being created immediately so that is extremely cool and as you see here I have one key set up to launch and switch to Final Cut Pro I have another key set to launch and switch to logic pro uh so here's Final Cut number one and if I press number two you're going to see logic pro launch here and then I could just quickly switch between those applications and that's just the start that's just the very beginning you can customize this to just an insane degree pretty much do anything you want with any of the keys on the keyboard not just the macro Keys here um but pretty much any sort of functionality you can think to assign you can record your own macros uh you can use OS system level shortcuts you can uh just reassign a key to a different key if you want to and then there's the illumination and this is really impressive as well because there's just a ridiculous amount of customization that you can do like I said each key has its own LED light and you can change individual keys so say you only wanted one key to have a light you could do that if you wanted to and not only does it have a full color palette you can actually put in hexadecimal values and get exact colors that you're looking for for individual keys or you can as I shown you here you can select all keys it's sort of almost like Photoshop for your keyboard I mean you're literally um just dragging and selecting Keys you can copy and paste key uh color values between Keys um you can set up almost like gradients here's a breathe effect so it will transition between the different gradients sort of like Photoshop gradients um and it's just really impressive what you're able to do with this on the Fly and you can see the changes happen immediately as you see here so this is the breathe effect which basically transitions between the colors selected on the timeline that you set up there um and you can set that up with as many colors as you want and change them to any color that you want uh let's look at some other effects here all right so we have this effect and of course these are all built-in effects and you can go in and change the colors if you want there's also some additional templates that you can set up so disco mode let's try that so here's disco mode of course this is ridiculously distracting but cool nonetheless uh and that's just like I said the tip of the iceberg you can set individual keys if you want to select individual keys using the pointer you can drag and select multiple Keys you can use an dropper tool to copy values from one key to another and of course you can go in and disable illumination for all keys and then go in and select an individual key and say hey for instance how about our Final Cut Pro um macro that we have set up here or shortcut so I'm just going to choose steady for that first one and that's sort of the color for the Final Cut Pro icon number one I'm going to choose this one and here's the color for the logic pro icon so that's easily identifiable on the screen using those macros so one is uh final cut to is logic sort of the colors of the app icons themselves so that's pretty much it folks there's of course lots more that you can go in and customize with relation to macros and key customization and bindings and colors but let me show you this because this is important it would be ridiculous for me to talk about this keyboard without at least letting you hear how the keys sound when you press them so if you're familiar with the Sherry MX switches that you get uh the Sher MX Brown switches that you get on some mechanical keyboards it sounds similar and it feels similar when you type on it it's not a super loud click like the Blue switches um it's sort of a subdued uh tactile response of course but not overly loud not going to annoy the wife or the kids or anything or the dog for that matter so folks let me know what you guys think Down Below in the comments section this is Jeff with 9 to-5 Mac\n"