My experience with Apple’s Magic Keyboard for the Mac has been a love-hate situation, at best. It is slim, sleek, offers a fantastic scissor-switch, and serves the Touch ID convenience. What’s not to love?
Well, for starters, the asking price is a steep $200, which is too much for a non-mechanical keyboard. There is no backlight. It is not ergonomic. The looks, though understated, are bland.
Merely months into splurging on it, I replaced it with a mechanical keyboard for my Mac setup. But typing on a mechanical keyboard that was destined for gaming wasn’t exactly kind to my fingers.
That is, until I came across the Satechi SM3 Slim, a low-profile mechanical keyboard that is almost tailor-made for Mac productivity. It gave me everything Apple couldn’t, for nearly half the price.
Oodles of charm, and substance to go with it
Satechi has been making fantastic accessories targeted at Apple gear for a while now. Their Mac Studio base is a beautiful piece of functional add-on, and I particularly love their trio wireless charging kit. The keyboard, however, is an altogether different ball game.
With the SM3 Slim, Satechi didn’t chase the signature matching Apple aesthetics. Instead, the brand created its own two-tone design language while fixing some of the biggest flaws of Apple’s pricey keyboard.
To begin with, the build is solid, thanks to an aluminum frame. The whole kit, however, isn’t too bulky, thanks to the polycarbonate base. The resting height profile is over twice that of the Magic Keyboard for Macs.
It’s not much of an issue, but there’s a kickstand underneath to achieve the elevation you need for a comfortable wrist position. And oh, it is backlit, something Apple’s keyboard sorely misses out on.
The feet are not step-locked, which means you can’t adjust the incline height. What you get is a sole elevated profile, or a flat platform. It wasn’t a problem for me, but you should check it out in person, if possible, before splurging on it.
You can adjust the brightness levels and pick from over a dozen backlight patterns. I typically work in a dark room for maximum immersion, and it was quite a sigh of relief to see that the Satechi keycaps were backlit.
The optical passthrough through the keycaps is sufficiently bright, even at mid-settings. In case you’re wondering, yes, there are dedicated keys integrated with the functional row for backlight adjustment.
It fills a lot of gaps
This is a full 108-key layout we are talking about, and thankfully, the deck is spacious enough for clearly demarcated key islands. The direction, page control, and the number pad are well spaced.
You also get dedicated shortcut keys for connection switching, playback controls, and mode change, among others. Talking about connectivity, the suite is pretty decked out on the Satechi SM3 Slim keyboard.
It can be paired with up to four devices at once, and switching between them is nearly seamless. I often keep my iPad close to my computing desk, and didn’t face any troubles switching the input across.
Though I did notice a few occasional input lags during device switching. For wireless connections, you can either pick between the dual Bluetooth 5.0 lane or the 2.4 GHz channel. I appreciate this flexibility, and so will any other person who prefers a clean desktop view devoid of a wired mess.
I prefer wired input, so the bundled USB-C cable was my preferred connection route to the Mac. However, I also used it for a while with my Windows PC, and for that setup, the 2.4 GHz receiver came in handy.
Types like a smooth charm
Let’s talk about the typing experience, which is the real differentiator here. Satechi has equipped the SM3 Slim with in-house brown switches. Now, there are both good and bad sides to this approach.
These are proprietary switches, which means if you run into mechanical issues, your only option is to contact Satechi customer support for replacement units. Second, these are not hot-swappable, though it shouldn’t matter much to the target audience that is predominantly buying it for productivity.
On the positive side, the switches offer a delightful typing experience, despite being low-profile. It’s not quite as fluid as linear switches, but even after working all day, you won’t feel the tardiness that usually comes with working on mechanical keyboards.
The keys offer an acceptable 2.6mm of vertical travel, and the actuation force worth 50gf also sits in the comfort territory. The keycaps have a beautiful inward curve that offers ample resting place for the fingertips.
On a comparative note, the actuation point is registered at a vertical depth of 1.4mm, which is slightly above the key travel you get on the MacBook keyboard and a bunch of other laptops out there. So, if you are starting your journey with a mechanical keyboard, the Satechi SM3 Slim is the most subtle and rewarding transition route.
Feedback from the switches is satisfyingly springy, and the inward press is also fairly reassuring. You can almost feel the actuation point, which goes a long way at ensuring that the keystroke has been registered and you didn’t run into the proverbial case of a ghost press.
Another benefit of using the brown switches is that they are relatively quiet. And thanks to the low-profile layout and the open undersides, the sound dissipation is also fairly subtle and not as annoyingly clicky as gaming keyboards with blue or green switches.
Satechi offers additional keycaps in the bundle for switching the Command and Option keys with those corresponding to a Windows layout. Thankfully, you don’t need a tool to remove the keycaps.
Just pull around the keycap edges and gently press the new ones in place. With a simple keyboard shortcut, you can switch the input mode between the two platforms. Now, this bit is pretty controversial, but I like that there’s no extra app involved here.
It’s a simple plug-and-play approach, and only a few keyboard shortcuts to ease you into your workflow. On the flip side, you can’t create custom shortcuts. Personally, I don’t mind, since this is an unabashedly all-work, no-play keyboard.
It’s an easy pick
Priced at $119.99, the Satechi SM3 Slim is a fantastic option for any desktop setup. For getting work done, it’s far more versatile and inherently superior to the Magic Keyboard. There are plenty of connectivity options to pick from, and the keyboard is backlit with a brightness control perk.
The build quality is sturdy, the switches offer a lovely level-up in the typing experience, and the multi-device connectivity is an underrated convenience. The only miss is Touch ID, but I can trade that out for a password input if the rest of the package is appealing.
My only advice when you go shopping for this one? Pick the Light color option, which offers a stunning two-tone white-grey color combo. The black shade I got for myself is quite a looker, too, but it doesn’t match my desktop styling.
