Corsair’s latest keyboard is its first with magnetic Hall effect switches

theverge.com:

By Jon Porter, a reporter with five years of experience covering consumer tech releases, EU tech policy, online platforms, and mechanical keyboards.

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I’ve been testing Corsair’s new $229.99 K70 Max mechanical keyboard for the last few days — its first to use magnetic Hall effect sensors to register keypresses, allowing for new features like the ability to customize how far you have to press a key before it registers a keypress. The company is branding the switches as “Corsair MGX” to distinguish them from its existing optical mechanical OPX switches and keyboards with standard mechanical Cherry MX switches. Alongside it, the company is also announcing a new headset: the HS80 Max Premium Wireless RGB. 

Manufacturers like SteelSeries and Wooting have been making keyboards equipped with Hall effect sensors for a few years now. The basic idea is that each switch has a magnet inside its stem. Press the switch, and a Hall effect sensor in the PCB under the switch can sense that the magnet has gotten closer and register a keypress. In contrast, traditional mechanical switches rely on two metal contacts coming together to register a press, while optical switches spot when a switch stem gets in the way of a beam of infrared light.

The advantage of this magnetic approach is that it’s inherently analog, meaning the Hall effect sensor can tell whether a switch has been pressed a little bit or a lot. Corsair is making use of this capability in a couple of different ways.

First, it’ll allow users to customize the exact point when one of its MGX switches actuates (read: registers a keypress) from anywhere between an ultra-responsive 0.4mm