Review: The Mercury Rocketeer Keyboard

First, a confession: I’m not typing on the Mercury Rocketeer keyboard right now. It’s not because I don’t love the design, the colors, the keys, and the switches. It’s because I can’t use the type of keyboard the Rocketeer is without driving myself nuts.

This keyboard, a collaboration between designer Zslane and Massdrop, is a 60% layout. This means its about as big as a standard typewriter but doesn’t have arrow keys or a number pad. This means, in practice, you have to press a function key to access the arrow keys and other things that you might be used to if you use a lot of command lines and shortcuts.

That said, as a lover of mechanical keyboards I will try to use this one as often as I can to write. The key travel is amazing, the sound is satisfying as a Selectric, and the design is wonderful.

At $250 it’s a bit steep but the entire package, from the wonderful keycaps to the aluminum case, are very well executed. I could definitely seeing this be a writer’s keyboard a la the Freewrite or a second keyboard for those who need very few of the key commands that I depend on.

The bottom line? I love this thing. But because of my typing and work style I can’t use it. If you’d like me to send it to you, please comment below and I’ll ship it out to a lucky reader.

SPECS