Driver

There is no dedicated software driver support for the AZIO MK MAC BT keyboard, with all functionality being hardware based over native OS HID drivers. As such, I have chosen to combine the Driver and Performance pages into one.

Performance

AZIO claims the keyboard to support six-key roll over on MacOS, which I was able to separately confirm. However, on Windows systems, I was only able to get 4KRO on two separate systems. Given the wireless nature of the device coupled with no real support specified for Windows, I am okay with this and honestly had no discernible issues even with 4KRO the vast majority of the time I tested the keyboard. No key chatter was detected using Switch Hitter, so all is good on that end.

The non-lit keys in the Switch Hitter test image above are also those you will not get with this keyboard in Windows, and also note that the positioning of the Alt and OS keys is different here compared to the image above or other Windows system keyboards, although they work as per the stock keycap placement, as you would expect. The secondary functions on the Fn key row are also MacOS-specific, as are the F13-F15 keys, and these will not work on Windows systems, although the dedicated volume controls work fine. The mute on/off button has a clicky feedback to it and needs to be bottomed out to actuate. The volume wheel has discrete steps you can feel when turning it in either direction as this is an infinite travel wheel, and it takes two steps to actuate a 2% change in volume up or down, depending on whether you turn the wheel up or down respectively. As such, you will have to turn the wheel a lot to change the volume significantly, and here is where a free-scroll option would have been nice, but it not being here is by no means a deal breaker. The Bluetooth range is dependent also on the Bluetooth device on your computer, and I had no issues maintaining connectivity with even older laptops from 2013 with Bluetooth 3.0 m-PCIe cards from 15-20 feet away.

Given the whole hullabaloo about the battery size as seen on the previous page, battery life and charging times were very high on my testing protocol here. I first had an inclination about the battery when the keyboard lasted all of six days at an average 4.5 hours of actual use per day before it gave the low battery warning, but I chalked that up to the keyboard having been tested and then boxed up for a while before it came my way. I usually check each keyboard for a few days before doing anything that affects it from its out-of-the-box state, including disassembly, so I do a full charge and then measure its battery life if it does not last past the testing duration of 2-3 weeks on average. As it is, charging the AZIO MK MAC BT also took longer than it should have at 6 hours each time for a total of three charge/discharge cycles done. Battery life was also no different with the low battery light and led to a non-responsive keyboard after 6-7 days each time, which is in stark contrast to the month-long battery life claimed.

At this point, I had disassembled the keyboard and noticed that the battery size was actually a lot smaller, so I brought up the poor battery life with AZIO, asking whether this lower battery rating was perhaps the reason. AZIO claimed that the battery had been 250 mAh throughout, and that the keyboards had been tested for a full battery life of 30 days at eight hours per day of continuous use. They offered to replace my keyboard entirely or send a new battery by itself, and I took them up on the latter so as to have everything else be as constant as possible. This new battery was very easy to install in lieu of the older one by simply removing the tap over the red and black connection wires and actually did much better too. The battery came charged out of the box, and the keyboard has now lasted 18 days at the same usage levels as before without the low battery indicator light coming on. I will update this article after a minimum of three charge/discharge cycles to also talk about charging times, but so far, so good. Regardless, this is another point of poor quality control here, which does not help either.

Finally, upon looking at customer reviews, I noticed a constant trend of complaints from MacOS users earlier this year about the keyboard timing out after ten minutes and the keyboard then having issues re-pairing without having to be turned off and on first, which can of course get really annoying if you were using this keyboard while it happened. I can confirm that this never happened to me, and I even borrowed a MacBook to confirm that this was no longer the case. After ~10-12 min of no activity, the keyboard does go into a low-activity mode in which there is a half a second of delay if you then use it before the keystrokes are visible on the monitor, but nothing is lost in terms of lag or keystrokes alike. AZIO mentioned that their first batch employed a full timeout after ten minutes of no activity that did not play well with MacOS or their customers, and it has since also been removed. But as my experience showed, there is a remnant of it, which I am happy to see. I tested it with the older battery since I knew battery life was poor there, and this remnant helped increase battery life by putting the keyboard into an idle mode of sorts. That said, all this could have been circumvented had AZIO actually gone with a 1200 mAh battery here. It is really unfortunate that everything I and paying customers have been complaining about is based on this.


The Kailh (Kaihua) Brown switch used here is similar to the more popular Cherry MX Brown switch in that both are medium-force tactile switches. In the absence of any backlighting, AZIO went with the older-designed switch with the opaque housing, which is fine. What does make it differ from the Cherry MX Brown is that it has a rated tactile peak force of 50 gf (vs. 45 gf for the Cherry MX Brown) and similarly, its actuation and bottoming-out forces are also higher by 5 gf each (42 vs 37, and 60 vs. 55 gf) when compared to the Cherry MX Brown switch. Everything else is identical in that both have a ~2 mm actuation distance, 2.2 mm pre-travel, and a total travel distance of 4 mm with gold-plated crosspoints to minimize metal oxidation. My testing of twenty randomly chosen switches on this keyboard revealed an average tactile force of 50.10 gf, which is close to the rated value. The average bottoming out force was 59.82 gf, which is a tad lower than the 60 gf rating I would have liked to see, but it is otherwise nothing that would affect functionality given it is easy to not bottom out here with some practice.


As always, the sound of a keyboard is based on more than just the switch type. So when comparing sound clips, consider the keyboard as a whole. In this case, I have provided above an example sound clip of me typing on the AZIO MK MAC BT keyboard sample at ~90 WPM. For context, you can find sound clips from other keyboards here, including those with tactile switches.