This review took a lot longer than average, and if you read the entire article, you would know why. Between the battery-rating commotion and the poor battery life with the first battery, I decided to take my time to better understand the product and factors affecting it. Indeed, as of now, I am still testing battery life of the keyboard with the second battery over a minimum of three full charge/discharge cycles, but so far, so good. All I am asking for here is 4+ weeks of battery life with 5-6 hours of use each day, which is still less than what AZIO claims, though plenty for me as a desktop keyboard that I will not travel with and have next to a charging power bank or PC more often than not. I even used it on my couch in the living room a lot, and it was a pleasure to use (sans the wrist rest, of course) compared to the generic wireless Logitech membrane keyboard I use with the HTPC.

My opinion of the AZIO MK MAC BT went through a real rollercoaster here, with a high during the first couple of days after seeing the good packaging and build quality, as well as the white color scheme, which, while distinctly Mac-like and a design that looks inspired by the Corsair K70, is still a breath of fresh air in a market that is dominated by black boxes. Noting also that this was designed just for MacOS with really no support for Windows systems, I was happy that everything I wanted in a work environment worked just fine. You can also use Autohotkey to remap the Alt/OS keys if you want to swap them around or assign the PRT SCR cluster back, although the secondary functions with the Fn key row are not available. Dedicated volume control is always nice, though, and I used it a lot even though I would have liked to see steps with the wheel make a larger difference.

Battery life, assuming you have a battery that actually works, was fine, too, as was the Bluetooth range. Use of Bluetooth 3.0 doesn't help with either regardless of whether you have the current or a newer iteration, but with what is essentially a bog-standard keyboard without backlighting, that really doesn't change anything. AZIO has a new wireless mechanical keyboard coming out with backlighting, and it has a massive 6000 mAh battery (rated), but I expect that to sell for more than $200. As it is now, if this were not $80, things would have been a different story, and I am overlooking a lot of the principle issues here knowing the first con is fixed now and the second does appear to be something that can be fixed with customer support. I will give props to AZIO's support also since I had not mentioned my status as a reviewer and had a good experience even though I had openly admitted to voiding the warranty by taking the keyboard apart.

The score is reflective of the entire keyboard and the review process it went through, and AZIO has to recognize that these issues came up because of their own weak quality control. The product award below assumes you have a good battery as that was really the only issue out of my control, and the overall package is still impressive at this price point.