SteelSeries Apex 7 TKL Compact Mechanical Gaming Keyboard – OLED Smart Display – USB Passthrough and Media Controls – Linear and Quiet – RGB Backlit (Red Switch)

Pros: Love how quiet the keyboard is. The key clicks just feel so nice. Feels really well made. Cons: Dont really all the illumination, had to turn some of that off. other than that 10/10

Within a year many keys on the left side of the keyboard began to fail intermittently. Steelseries would not honor any warranty repair or replacement despite the clear statement that the keys are guaranteed for 50 million keypresses.

This is by far my favorite mech keyboard! Great purchase but ONLY IF you mind not having a basic keypad on the right hand side. I did not read close enough upon arrival was disappointed at first. Once I got past the no keypad part I realized I didnt need it in the first place nor do I play and games with it I legit just paid bills with it :D :D so after consideration I decided that I love this keyboard if you are looking for something that works great looks great and sounds great get this product!!! Oh and your able to customize it in so many ways!

I bought this keyboard for work. Im a programmer and try to invest in the tools I use every day for hours on end. I really liked the look and feel of this keyboard, but it died in just under 2 years. The X and P keys have started to die for some reason. They either dont type anything or double type the letter. I looked into replacing these switches, but the board doesnt seem very accessible for that. Overall for a mechanical keyboard, even one used heavily, I wouldve expected more life. I bought this keyboard in March 2021 to replace a corsair k70 that Id been using for 6 years at work. I only replaced it because I wanted a TKL keyboard and the RGB was nice. Now Im back to that K70, I guess.

Ive only had one other *real* gaming keyboard before this one and this one I like a lot better. Its easy to type on and its leds are bright. Also the OLED pannel is fun to play with. Overall, I dont think Ill be buying another keyboard in a while.

I bought the Steelseries Aex 7 tkl with high expectations, I was going to use for multiple fps games, and I had watched alot of youtube videos, praising the keyboard, for ergonomics, typing, and gaming. Needless to say, my high expectations were fullfilled. I bought the apex 7 tkl with Cherry MX Red switches, linear and quiet, the sound was alright, it was certainly quiter than Cherry MX Blues, but it was still a bit loud, the reaction speed is amazing, and it almost feels like the switches are touch sensitive. Rgb and the little Oled screen were cool, not outsanding, but they were still cool. The Steelseries engine 3 offered alot of rgb option like Colorshift, Static Color, etc.... The media controls in the upper right corner were also a nice and at sometimes pretty useful detail. Anyways summing up my thoughts I would give it 9/10 and would definitely recommend.

Really like this keyboard. With brown switches its a very light touch for standard typing but is also good for gaming. Perfect feel for me. It is more clicky than my old MS keyboard for sure but its not obnoxious. I really like that you can set different colors for each and every key. I use this so I can more quickly find where the line of numbers are vs Fkeys and also put different colors on the movement keys (like backspace, delete, return, alt ctrl etc.) and disable keys like shift-lock and INS which I never use but keep the option to put them back in use with the simple switch of the profiles. Which brings me to my one and only issue. The software for managing the keyboard has a few MAJOR BUGS that caused me to lose a lot of work setting up profiles. After setting up a few profiles, I wanted to look at some of the built in profiles which you can do using the illumination menu on the small OLED screen. The problem is, once I did that, it overwrote my profile. This happened multiple times after using the mini screen to load profiles as well. And I made SURE I was doing a LOAD PROFILE and not a SAVE PROFILE. But very odd things happened going back and forth between the OLED screens settings/profile/etc. menues and loading up the SteelSeries Engine software. I would find my old profile names replaced, names copied from one profile to another and just completely wiped out. To avoid this issue I keep a number of backups of my profiles so that if it gets wiped out again, I can seem to use the SteelSeries Engine to load one of my backups and then use the mini OLED screen to Save Profile etc. But its a big pain. I have found that if you just avoid using the OLED screen menus to load up illuminations/presets or use it to change profiles you will probably be ok. But I know there are some pointer issues or memory leaks or bad de-references in the software because sometimes my profile name will get overwritten with a name I never even typed that looks like a join of other names. Also, the name of the extra configs that you create.... those names will be overwritten with the names of the names of the build in profiles etc. So, some major bugs in the software really take away from an otherwise great experience. TIP to SteelSeries: Run your software through a good static analysis tool (i.e. SonarQube) and fix the bugs. UPDATE: Works great for one computer for the second computer in tin used to reset and I have found no solution even though I have exhaustively looked on the Internet for a solution. The only workaround for the reset is to unplug it and plug it back in which is totally annoying. Therefore I drop the rating. It’s unfortunate but it works so well on one computer it’s so poorly on another. FINAL UPDATE: I found that using USB 2.0 connections worked better than USB 3.0 connections. Also using a USB-C switch/KVM will likely cause problems. So if you’re using with a single computer and find the USB connection that works, It’s gonna be a great keyboard. However, you may find the notorious repeating reset bug which makes the keyboard unusable. I had to buy a separate USB 2.0 switch and connect to USB 2.0 connections in order to use this with two computers. Kind of a big pain but I figured it was better than returning a keyboard that I really liked.

for a few weeks usages, SteelSeries Apex 7 TKL is great (red switch). just want to let the next buyer know that if you buying the Red switch, you probably want to lube the switch because if you crazily press a certain key like me, the switch will starting to have loud spring noise, so lube the switch will help a lot on the pressing experience as well as the sound quality. Secondly, the cable is super thick, I looking forward to seeing the change with it.

Been using it for an year now. Bought the brown switches variant Pros: 1) Build quality is good, feels good, keycaps and keys are sturdy 2) Lighting is bright! The ease to configure them is amazing 3) The media controls is a good feature. I especially love the metal roller for adjusting volume. 4) USB passthrough is very useful. Cons: 1) Brown keys are not as tactile as I want them to be. They are less tactile compared to cherry MX browns. Actuation force is small enough for me to inadvertently use wrong keystrokes. 2) One of keys sometimes presses twice. I did not expect it to start failing so soon. Its not often but seems like it will last just a few more months. 3) Keyboard is loud if you are a heavy handed ttyper. Consider getting a switch dampener, otherwise the noise made is loud. 4) The wrist rest is not really comfortable. There are better ones out there.

I l0ve how customizable it is! If you have extra money and you really want a keyboard, I would definitely recommend this one!