The Design Details of Our Keychron Low-Profile Keyboard Stabilizers

Stabilizer is one of the most important parts that affect the mechanical keyboard typing experience as it helps to create a stable and consistent downstroke on big keys when pressed together with a switch.

Several big keys on our Keychron K3 and K7 keyboards will come with stabilizers, such as the left Shift, Enter, Backspace, and space bar. Conventional stabilizers will stay on the same straight line with the mechanical switch on the regular keyboards. However, on the K3 and K7 low-profile keyboards, our team made an innovative decision to put the stabilizers a bit higher than the switch from the top view, giving it a triangular shape, as shown on the MX style keycap stems below.

The positive result of this triangular design makes every keypress on the big keys more stable than ever before because as we learned from physics, the triangle is the strongest shape.

A common misunderstanding is that this design will make the K3 and K7 not compatible with most of the regular profile alternative keycaps on the market as they’re all made for stabilizers and switch on a straight line.

However, the fact is, even if we abandon the triangular design to make the stabilizer and the switch stay on the same line, most of the regular profile alternative keycaps on the market do not fit low-profile keyboards well anyways because of the keycap heights. In addition, the available assortment of alternative low-profile keycaps is almost nonexistent.

We started the stabilizer and keycap stem design from scratch searching and developing the best solution we can think of.

One possible question people may have is that if our design is better, why hasn't the industry adopted our stabilizer design? To be honest, we’re not sure of the reason either because when we designed the stabilizer system from scratch, we designed the best solutions to solve the challenges we were facing.

The low-profile mechanical keyboard is still new in the market, that’s why its hard to find compatible alternative low-profile keycaps on the market. In order to provide more flexibility for our users, we’re working on a low-profile PBT keycap set and plan to launch it this year in 2021. Check out the innovative design on our Keychron K3 and K7 keyboards below.