When computer scientists promised that the future of computing would mean streamlined, minimalist hardware, nobody told Keychron. Or perhaps Keychron just chose to ignore that promise, or the company sees something we did not.
Behold the Keychron C100 8K Giant Custom Macro Pad—a 10 × 10 square block featuring 100 blank mechanical keys staring back at you like a plastic, RGB-lit waffle. It has so many keys that it makes Stack Overflow’s April Fools’ joke-turned-actual product, The Key V2 Macropad, look woefully inadequate.
Why settle for a tiny Stream Deck or a 12-button side panel when you can have a giant grid of absolute chaos on your desk? At a surprisingly reasonable US$64.99, the C100 8K gives you a completely blank slate. Literally. Not a single letter, number, or icon is printed on those semi-transparent ASA keycaps. Out of the box, it is a US$65 block of 100 silent buttons that do absolutely nothing until you manually map them using the web-based QMK Launcher.
Want to bind all 100 keys to different variations of “Ctrl + Z” for your worst Photoshop mistakes? Go for it. Need 40 dedicated keys for hyper-specific Excel formulas, 30 for Flight Simulator cockpit controls, and another 30 just to launch funny Discord audio clips? The power is entirely yours.
Naturally, it features an 8,000 Hz polling rate. When you hit key number 73 to open the calculator app, you need it to launch with sub-millisecond, competitive esports latency.
It is completely hot-swappable, packed with linear Apex Red switches, and features full per-key RGB control. Just make sure you print out a physical map of what you programmed each key to do—unless you fancy accidentally muting your mic when you meant to render a video or, worse, launching a livestream while butt-naked in front of your computer, innocently working on some obscure content video.
Images: Keychron.
