Top critical review
1.0 out of 5 starsNot worth the price. Feature coverage is limited and the device is held back by poor design.
Reviewed in the United States on April 7, 2024
This keyboard isn't worth a third the price you pay for it. I'd have given this an extra star if I hadn't paid a premium for it; the cost in conjunction with how it just barely checks the boxes on its basic feature descriptions drops my rating to rock bottom.
1. The keys are SO sensitive you'll be swearing that if you break wind in their general direction you're going to get five random keystrokes. It's ridiculous. You'd love to think that setting the key actuation point to the very bottom would let you work around this, but no; the actuation point goes nowhere near where the key bottoms out (other gripes on actuation settings below). Every single time you start typing at a comfortable pace you'll be bumping the sides of keys accidentally, and every time you get in a scramble in whatever game you're playing you're going to get extra inputs. From what I can tell, you can't replace the switches to something with a tactile feel or a heavier weight, even from the SteelSeries website (for other keyboards they sell: YES, the parts are there; for THIS model (Apex Pro): NO, there's nothing, at least as of the time of this review).
2. In general, actuation settings have issues:
a. You cannot apply actuation settings on anything to the right of the ENTER key or the Steel Series meta key itself or the Function keys. I don't know why I paid extra for a full keyboard over a third of the keys aren't fully functional.
b. Dual actuation doesn't seem consistent or especially useful. I tried to find purposes for it but in my experience it's absolutely worthless. It also isn't available for the whole keyboard.
c. It's also really easy to accidentally screw up all your custom actuation settings because by default it has all keys selected when you go into that part of the engine configuration, which is counter-intuitive because you might have come there while working on a specific key from the bindings or illumination tabs. For the same reasons, just don't EVER mess with actuation settings from the keyboard's built-in adjustments, especially if you have custom actuation settings on different keys, because you'll lose everything.
d. The "rapid trigger" configuration fails to impress. Sometimes I think I can feel it working but I still miss fast double-taps frequently enough. This also doesn't work at all until after you apply a firmware update to the keyboard (at least as of when I bought this late in 2023)
e. Setting a key's actuation value to 4.0 (represented as the bottom of the stroke visually in the settings) is still significantly high in the keypress.
3. You can't cycle backward through on-board profiles, and cycling is slow and clunky. You also can't assign hotkeys for accessing specific profiles on the fly. This is especially annoying when you have custom keybindings, so moving from a game to respond to someone in chat is really slow and clunky.
4. Macro keybindings don't work as you expect, unless they're brainlessly simple like Shift plus some other key. Not what I expected and not what I paid for.
6. All the default illumination settings are childishly distracting novelties and completely unusable by anyone trying to focus on anything whatsoever. Be prepared for a trippy flashbang every time you cycle from profile #2 back to your profile #1 until you manually override all 5 illumination profiles on the keyboard.
7. You must have 5 and exactly 5 profiles loaded at all times. You can't have less or more than that. You can store additional profiles in the engine config, but there's no officially supported way to back up or externally edit any of your profiles.
8. You can't get to your Apex Pro engine configuration directly. You need to open this other app called "SteelSeries GG" first. The "SteelSeries GG" is also problematic because occasionally it will notify you that it needs an update but the notification vanishes extremely fast and you then need to find the update under Settings->About.
9. The whole physical design of the keyboard:
a. Why of all places would you put the keyboard's meta button for special functions and changing modes in the place of a commonly-used key? Why not put it in its own spot? Heck, why not put it in place of SCROLL LOCK which hasn't served any purpose whatsoever since 1985? Yes, you can re-assign it, but the key looks wrong and you have to do it for each profile. Just bad design.
b. The keycaps themselves. Some edgelord at SteelSeries decided to be cool and invert the shift-modified character of each key with its unmodified counterpart, so for instance ":" appears BELOW ";" and "?" appears BELOW "/". This is just a visual thing and it won't bother too many people who already know how to type but it's just another wacky design choice that makes no sense.
c. The cord for this keyboard is just COMICALLY stiff and thick. There's absolutely no justification for this, except maybe to keep it from getting stuck under your corner keys such as CTRL. If you occasionally have to rearrange your desk, such as for things like cleaning, or maybe swapping from your work setup to your free-time setup (this is my case) expect to have this cord fighting you every step of the way.
d. Be prepared to have normal-width cords such as your mouse and headphones get stuck under the keys on the edge (looking at you, CTRL). There's nothing mechanically preventing this from happening. You'll regret this every time you find your CTRL key not actuating when you press it because you have a charging cable under it, or you drag your Apex Pro off your desk because your headphone cord was wrapped up in the top row of keys. Just make sure everything else on your desk is wireless and you'll be fine, I guess?
e. The scroll wheel and special illuminated button on the top right of the keyboard. Seriously, I did NOT need another place to control my volume and play/pause videos. You CAN use this to adjust illumination and other settings but it's slow to start up and not especially friendly and it has potential to screw up your per-key custom settings. This behavior should have been customizable; in fact I dare say the scroll wheel should have been where you cycle up and down through profiles, and that button should have been the meta key.
10. On a few occasions my profiles have become corrupt and/or de-synchronized from the engine config view while saving and editing. This is hard to reproduce but it sucks when you put a lot of work into sensitivity and custom bindings and illumination for a specific setup.
Pros:
It's a keyboard. Custom bindings work. It hasn't broken yet. Feels solid. For a full-sized keyboard it's space-efficient even though the cord is obnoxious.
In conclusion, I think many of these problems could be alleviated by better firmware and engine config features, but not everything. The only special feature I really needed, the custom keybindings, is working, and I'm happy that the keyboard feels like it's unlikely to break anytime soon, but everything else is a disappointment. I should have returned this thing but it didn't feel right with the effort I put into setting it up and with my fingerprints all over it.
Any remaining uncorrected typographical errors present in this review, I'm blaming the random stray keystrokes.
