This mechanical keyboard is astonishingly thin, and you can reserve one for $1

If you don't get on with a standard keyboard, the best mechanical keyboards can be a true game changer. But sometimes the keyboards that are most ergonomic look the most off-putting: glossy, noisy, lit up like a fairground.

London startup Electronic Materials Office (EMO) has set out to change that with Altar II, a fully mechanical keyboard that’s just 4.75mm thick. Think about it: that's less than half a centimetre. Super-thin or what?

Machined from a single block of aluminium, the Altar II packs in haptic feedback, a built-in speaker, red backlighting, up to 30 days of battery life and a magnetically detachable dial for volume and media. It’s designed first and foremost for Mac users, though it works with Windows and Linux too.

Altar II launches on Kickstarter on 10 November, and will retail at $349. But if you reserve one on EMO’s website now for a refundable $1, you can buy it for $249. Delivery is expected in early summer 2027. I asked founder Andrew Emerson how it all came together.

How did it all start?

Mechanical keyboards were a lockdown hobby for me. We all had our weird things to keep us busy I suppose. Most people baked sourdough but I became fixated on mechanical keyboards. I was obsessed with how they felt, and how far people would go to get their keyboards just the way they liked. A keyboard is also something you use every day, so I figured it was a worthwhile investment.

But after trawling the internet and Reddit, watching all the reviews, and buying a few keyboards, I just couldn’t find anything I liked. They all looked horrendous. Creaky plastic, glossy, gigantic, obnoxiously loud, and RGB (I hate RGB). It was really dreadful. So I decided that I would try and make my own.

The learning curve was huge. CAD, 3D visualisation, DFM, CNC milling, electrical design, firmware. This was all very much outside my wheelhouse as a software designer at the time. But it was a lot of fun to learn everything and pour myself into the project on nights and weekends. Eventually I came out the other side with a functional prototype of what would ultimately become Altar I.

I stood up a small website for Altar I with an email sign-up field, posted it online and... crickets. Annoyed, I went for a quick lunchtime run. When I came back the website had blown up on Hacker News (a popular tech forum), had hundreds of comments, and by the end of the week there were 10,000 people on the waitlist. That month I told my boss I was quitting to make keyboards full time.

Why did you make the keyboard so thin?

Firstly I will say I am absolutely not chasing the title of “thinnest keyboard ever”. The slim design of Altar II is the result of a few things.

Typically, keyboards come in two flavours. The first is thin keyboards, like the Apple Magic Keyboard, Logitech MX Keys, or the keyboard in your laptop. These keyboards usually look really nice on a desk. The switch mechanism they use is a rubber dome that collapses a membrane, which feels squishy, indistinct, and generally pretty bad.

The other kind of keyboard is the mechanical keyboard, which is typically tremendously thick because it houses a large mechanical switch. These switches have springs and electrical contacts, and when you press them, they feel really nice and tactile.

Altar II takes the best aspects of both these worlds and puts them together: an amazing-feeling mechanical switch, housed in a very slim chassis. That is the true innovation of Altar II. You can have your cake and eat it too. It also helps that a thin keyboard is more ergonomic and easier to transport.

There is a philosophical aspect to making Altar II as slim as possible too. I believe that technological advancement comes in two modes: miniaturisation and higher performance. I think we tapped out on increasing performance on computer keyboards in the mid 1980s, which leaves us with miniaturisation.

Making a very thin mechanical keyboard wasn't enough of a challenge though, I also wanted to pack in as much technology as possible: wireless Bluetooth, haptic feedback, a speaker, a magnetic dial. To me that really represented a technological leap and a challenge.

Are you still doing all this by yourself?

Altar I was very much a one-person passion project, with a little help from a few people along the way. But with Altar II the ambitions have been raised significantly. The device is an order of magnitude more complex and it really swings for the fences. To do this the team has expanded from one person to a small team of very talented people.

I look after the industrial design, graphic design, the website, conceptualising, marketing, and day to day running of the company. Steven and Jessica Nersesian, of Metric Designworks, are the people who make the designs reality, looking after CAD, DFM, mechanical engineering, and being the link between us and our manufacturers.

They have worked on products like the Playdate and various Teenage Engineering products. Kurtis Lew is our embedded engineer and is responsible for firmware, and Moritz Plattner is our electrical engineer and looks after things like our circuit board design.

Where exactly one person’s role ends and another’s begins is not clear in reality. Everyone has opinions and thoughts on everyone else’s domain. Altar II is a single product, and all these domains live within it. People using Altar II don't care whose idea a detail was, they just care that it feels right.

As for my background, before EMO I spent about ten years as a software designer across automotive, music, healthcare, and fashion. I’m also a traditionally trained graphic designer. At design school I focused on editorial design and typography. I think you can see some of that in EMO’s products.

Overall, Altar II is a much more professionalised operation than Altar I. Rather than being a pure passion project, we are now building Electronic Materials Office to be a long-term sustainable business.

The M-dial is genius: how did you come up with it?

M-Dial is a magnetically detachable, swappable, clickable dial for Altar II. It sticks on to the keyboard in a very satisfying way. There are two M-Dials included in the Altar II box: a standard issue size and a low-profile variant for travel. We’ll also be releasing the specs for M-Dial publicly, so you’ll be able to 3D print your own in whatever shape and size you like.

Why a dial at all? When you use a dial to change the volume on your computer, it just makes sense. It’s so much more intuitive than using buttons. There are a few extra niceties built into M-Dial too: you can click the dial once to play or pause media, double click to skip, triple click for previous, and long press to invoke Siri on macOS. These are all customisable in our companion app as well.

When we launched Altar I we got some feedback that although the overall shape of the device was easy to transport, the dial would sometimes get caught on things like people’s bags. So now it’s detachable. It also lets us slim down the Altar II packaging to make it more efficient, which is better for the environment.

What are the main changes from Altar I?

There’s a question to answer here first: Why make a successor to Altar I at all? When I sat down at my desk after shipping Altar I, I put it next to my Apple Magic Keyboard, and I thought: 'Hmm, I think I have unfinished business here.' Don’t get me wrong, I adore Altar I, and I’m incredibly proud of it. I thought with all the learnings from Altar I, it'd be possible to go even further and make an even more impressive product that could supplant the likes of the Magic Keyboard. But I would only make a successor product if it could be a true generational leap and an improvement in every way over Altar I.

And that’s what Altar II is. It really is a generational leap. Almost nothing carries over between the two devices, we’ve taken the opportunity to build everything from the ground up.

The most noticeable difference is the thickness. Altar II is almost 70% thinner than Altar I. Which is especially impressive when you consider that Altar I is itself a “low-profile” keyboard!

The other notable differences are that the switch platform is completely different, so the keycaps and stabilisers are totally redesigned. Of course the Altar II dial is magnetically detachable, and Altar II has a backlight, haptic feedback and a built-in speaker. We really threw everything we had at Altar II, and took so many lessons from Altar I as well.

Tom May is an award-winning journalist specialising in art, design, photography and technology. He is the author of the books The 50 Greatest Designers (Arcturus) and Great TED Talks: Creativity (Pavilion). Tom was previously editor of Professional Photography magazine, associate editor at Creative Bloq, and deputy editor at net magazine.