On one hand - design. Sometimes empty space is an important design aspect.
On the other hand, that space is almost entirely occupied by battery, antenna and the side facing buttons.
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My edit was too slow 
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Oh, yeah, saw it only now.
The switch hot swap sockets are indeed almost touching the bottom case - the only place where the battery could be is in the black slot on the right.
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Got excited to see a UK based peripheral company but decided this keyboard isn’t for me, for various reasons.
2 weeks runtime isnt too bad, it looks like the cell is a cylindrical format ?14500 size?
It’s a tiny pouch. 200 mAh.
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Damn! Slight Keychron regrets…
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We made it into Forbes!
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That’s awesome! Will this product be available internationally at some point?
For now it is Europe + US only, I think, but more countries are planned as far as I am aware. Probably with the second (and improved) production batch. Depends a bit on how well the first batch sells and which countries order the most.
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I just found the price which amounts to 447.45 USD. Is this price mainly due to the low volume of manufacture? Seems like a Keychron would be tough competition.
Yeah, mainly low volume, and a bit the focus on sustainable materials. Board is milled from recycled aluminum, plastic stuff is made from I think >50% recycled ocean plastics etc. I think the biggest price driver for now was prototyping and creating injection mold shapes for keycaps etc. Injection mold stuff is usually a huge chunk of money once, and dirt cheap from that point on. After the first batch made back the initial investment things get cheaper.
A re-run could be made substantially cheaper. Whether or not that will be the case I do not know - I am just the PCB dude 
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On another topic: 20mm are damn small if you have to squeeze a USB-C receptacle in. And I already used the shortest I could reasonably find.
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I suspect it’s to pay for all the greenwashing… And a London office.
Perhaps I missed it, but “assembled in UK”, without giving specifics of what is made where, is a big red flag for me.
Transparency is part of sustainability, if a supply chain isn’t transparent and can be verified, how can you claim sustainability?
“Waste-derived polymer”… Another red flag. What does this even mean? It sounds all fuzzy and warm and “eco” but what waste is it referring to? Manufacturing waste? Post-consumer waste?
This is with no offence to ebastler who’s probably done an outstanding job with the PCB design and (I’m assuming) has nothing to do with the marketing or the rest of the board.
The UK has so many consumer protections I’d expect that the claims being made about sustainable manufacturing would be regulated, but idk
NVM not the UK. Idk why I was thinking ebastler lived in the UK. 
I’m just a reading comprehension tragedy today smh
PCBs are manufactured/soldered in China, same factory I usually work with for most of my commercial scale projects.
I have no idea where the cases are machined or the plastic parts are being injection molded.
Final assembly is done in the UK (Put PCBs and buttons in cases, put switches in PCBs, put keycaps on switches - sounds fast, is actually quite a bit of work :D).
Regarding the plastic, it says this in the press kit:
Plastic made from post consumer waste
I do not know which percentage (100% recycled plastic is as far as I am aware almost impossible to injection mold). I know the alu was planned to be recycled to some percentage as well, not sure if it ended up in the final product.
But yeah, marketing and business decisions in general are not my job - I was only hired as an external electronics designer, but I’ve been on boards since before the company was officially founded as far as I remember ^^
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The company are “London based”, ebastler has done his PCB wizardry for them.
Yes UK has fairly good consumer protection, which is mostly surrounding quality/longevity of products.
“Sustainability” is a fairly new, huge grey area which is poorly regulated, I’d guess most claims would fall under advertising standards rather than consumer protection per say. As a hypothetical company “LeafyLaundry”, you obviously can’t lie and say “this washing machine is made in UK from 100% plant material”, but claims of how “eco-friendly” a product or company is are hard to verify due to the metrics used as a yardstick - are you reducing plastic consumption, or reducing CO2 emissions, or both…or?
This is intimidating. And that’s only the caps for one of the two boosts. MCU, second chip and a lot of passives on the other side.
Wonder if I should do reverse polarity protection… It will be quite a hit on driver efficiency, but a huge plus for safe operation. Hard choice.
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Reverse polarity protection could be done mechanically though you would need some extra tube length and limit yourself to button tops. Two unconnected pegs around the positive terminal that are longer than the terminal itself and prevent the wide negative contact from ever making contact with the terminal, or similar..
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It doesn’t cost too much with a 3333 PMOS : B17: 17mm +50W boost driver, DIY build information - #20 by thefreeman
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Huh, that’s a lot less than I expected. Which FET is this? I guess around 5 mOhm for it to have this little effect on the efficiency?