Packaging and Accessories

Vortex has used luxurious looking and feeling packaging here, with a similar-looking box as with the CORE. It is black everywhere and has the name and logo on the front and back and textures everywhere else. Unlike the Core, which had a magnetic side to reveal the keyboard inside, this one simply has an inner box that slides out.


The inner box has the keyboard immediately visible and held in place on a cardboard shelf with thick, soft foam on all four sides surrounding it. There is a cutout at the top to help remove the keyboard, and another in the middle to remove the cardboard piece itself, which reveals the included accessories underneath. Three plastic ziplock pouches contain everything, and the largest of these cotains several replacement keycaps - 18 to be exact. Included here are some MacOS exclusive keycaps (Command and Alt/Option in two different sizes) as well as some RGB-colored keycaps, as seen above. One of the complaints I had about the CORE was that the non-standard form factor resulted in replacement keycaps being hard to find, and Vortex has decided to help with that issue by providing some non-standard replacement keycaps with which you can to some extent personalize the keyboard to your liking. We will examine these keycaps in more detail on the next page.


The other two pouches contain the keyboard cable, which is a detachable male micro-USB to male Type-A USB cable that is the usual 1.8 m long, and some case feet. The feet included also address another of my complaints with the CORE wherein there was no option to elevate the keyboard at all, and the feet here are metal and match the case of the keyboard and have rubber pieces to stick to the bottom for grip, which also minimizes scratching. So far, so good!