Like many great products, the Elgato Stream Deck was not exactly new idea.
When the first device debuted in six years this month, we immediately compared it to Art Lebedev’s legendary Optimus Maximus keyboard, which promised an array of wrap-around OLED screens under your fingertips a full decade ago. Razer also pioneered LCD switches ahead of their time, mounting them on the keyboard and the company’s first Blade laptop.
But today, we’re celebrating the simple genius of Elgato — the company that finally turned it into a viable product by making it relatively cheap, convenient, and most importantly: Marginal.
Art Lebedev and Razer thought we wanted a new keyboard that transforms, as our primary computing input mechanism should be replaced with one that intelligently adapts to our needs.
Even today, the thought sounds great: “Why Photoshop and earthquake Offer you the same boring keyboard? You can practically hear Art Lebedev’s concept photos you ask.
Razer, perhaps inspired by that earthquake Keyboard Layout A follow-up question asked in 2011: “If your keys can turn, maybe you don’t need a lot of them to play PC games on the go?” The result was the Razer Switchblade, a 7-inch gaming laptop prototype created through a partnership with Intel.
Razer didn’t sell it, though. The last “Razer Switchblade” turned out to be much less exciting at the time: ten LCD keys and a touch trackpad built into a regular keyboard. You can almost see the stream if you look closely – but it’s still integrated, not yet Marginal.
That’s why the idea didn’t stick. Razer thought that users would buy an expensive keyboard ($250) or laptop ($2000+), give up knowing what input devices they already own, and trust that game developers would support the new Switchblade UI. It also didn’t help that the keys felt brutal—hard, flat, and brittle.
Elgato Stream Deck didn’t ask for any of these trade-offs.
The Stream Deck immediately offered itself as a purpose-built tool right down to its name, giving you handy buttons to control Twitch, OBS, and Twitter right out of the gate. (She’s doing a lot more than that today.) You put it down side by side My favorite keyboard, rather than a replacement, and between that and the $80 starting price of the six-key Stream Deck Mini, I’m easily sold out.
And the keys, those keys… soft, comfortable, inviting, each keystroke as jeweled as the pop of a piece of bubble wrap. I’m not saying it’s something like the sick crunch of a mechanical wrench – it’s a whole different fun.
Speaking of… I have a little announcement to make, a bonus for any Stream Deck owners who might read this story:
The Verge has the official Bubble-popping Stream Deck plugin!
Before he left on his 2,600-mile hike—seriously, he was hiking the Pacific Crest Trail—my dear colleague Mitchell Clark coded a bubble-popping app for his daydreams, complete with sound effects. (He actually sent it to Elgato on his first day on the road.) It works with as many buttons as you want; Tom even tested a full page of bubbles on his 32-button Stream Deck XL.
It’s right in the Elgato App Store, it’s our free gift to you, and you can download it now.
I’m up for an interview with the head of Elgato in the near future, and plan to ask how they managed to make these switches feel so good already. We already know that there is no small screen below each key:
The buttons are all lenses Which is located on top of one LCD screen. The more you know!