SteelSeries Apex Pro TKL (2023) review: I love mechanical keyboards now

The SteelSeries Apex Pro TKL is a tenkeyless version of SteelSeries' flagship gaming keyboard, and it's not just mechanical, the switches also magnetic. Every key in this keyboard can perform multiple functions in a single press, but to me, the simple typing experience is all it takes to make me a fan.

About this review: SteelSeries sent us the Apex Pro TKL (2023) for this review. The company didn't have any input in its content.

SteelSeries Apex Pro TKL (2023): Price and availability

SteelSeries sells the Apex Pro TKL (2023) at a variety of retailers in the United States and across the world, in addition to selling it on its own website.

Pricing comes in at $189.99 in the U.S., though pricing in Europe can vary by country. You can also get the Apex Pro in a full-size configuration if you want a number pad and larger media keys.

Design

It looks and feels great

The SteelSeries Apex Pro is a pretty great-looking keyboard. It has a 5000 series aluminum top plate that makes it feel very premium and hefty, though most of the construction is plastic, as you might expect. That's not to say it feels cheap, though, it's actually great overall. The keyboard comes with black keycaps that don't allow for a lot of light bleed, so it doesn't look obnoxious with its RGB lighting. However, you can buy plenty of great keycaps for it if you want a different style.

On the underside of the keyboard, you get adjustable feet with two different heights (three options in total if you want to use it flat), so you can get the right typing angle for you. I always use mine in the middle height setting, but you have options. There's also a rubber cover that hides the included keycap puller, which is a nice inclusion. I know that's not uncommon for premium mechanical keyboards, but it was my first time seeing it, and it's quite cool. It actually makes me want to experiment with different keycaps.

It has a screen

You get a fairly straightforward layout here without much in the way of special keys. There are some secondary functions for the F9 through F12, and a couple of media keys next to the black and white OLED display in the corner, which is in fact one of the highlights of this keyboard. The OLED display can show things like system information, custom animations, and game-specific content.

This can all be customized with the SteelSeries GG app on your PC, but SteelSeries actually made the OLED screen a bit more useful by building a menu into it. You can customize certain keyboard settings this way, including the brightness of the screen itself, the timeout settings, and more.

The wrist rest is okay

The only thing that doesn't necessarily feel amazing with this keyboard is the wrist rest, which is just fine. It's not cushioned and instead, it just has a rubber coating that does feel nice and helps you get comfortable. I don't necessarily have any complaints here, but I would have been more impressed by it if it had some cushioning for extra comfort.

The wrist rest attaches magnetically to the keyboard, and it's easy to remove, but it also stays firmly in place. The magnets are fairly strong, and I can move the keyboard a bit without the wrist rest coming loose, though only for small adjustments.

Keys and switches

It feels so good to type on this

Like I mentioned before, my first time loving a mechanical keyboard was with the Razer Ornata V2, which uses a mix of mechanical and membrane switches, and it's actually quite loud to type on. The SteelSeries Apex Pro TKL is nothing like that, but I love it so much more. This keyboard uses SteelSeries' own OmniPoint 2.0 Adjustable Switches, and while we'll get to the adjustable part in a bit, typing on it feels absolutely fantastic.

The switches are essentially linear, so the whole way down or up is super smooth, and it just feels great. They also travel up to 4mm, though they'll actuate long before that if you want them to. I've never typing on a keyboard as much as I do here, and while I loved the clicky feeling of my previous keyboard, the smoothness and relative quietness of these switches are fantastic. The stabilization is terrific, too. Pressing down on one edge of the spacebar feels no different from pressing the middle of it, it's great. Whenever I have to review a laptop now, I end up missing my desk setup.

(...)typing on it feels absolutely fantastic.

That's not to say I'm an expert typist either way. Because I use a lot of different laptops with different keyboards, I can be very clumsy when typing, so I can't really use a typing test as a good metric of this keyboard's performance. But I really do love typing on this keyboard. It's worth noting that you can't swap these switches out, though, since they're a very custom design.

You can adjust the actuation point

The real kicker with this keyboard is the adjustability of the key actuation, which is where the custom OmniPoint 2.0 switches really come into play. These keys travel up to 4mm up and down, but you probably don't want to activate the key at that last point. So, you can change it to almost anything you like to improve the accuracy and response of the keyboard. This is because each key uses a magnetic hall effect sensor, which measures changes in the intensity of a magnetic field to determine the distance from the key itself to the switch on the board. When the key reaches the distance you chose, it will activate.

(...)it can let you get just the right response time and actuation you need(...)

By default, keys will activate at 1.8mm of travel, but you can change it either using the menu on the OLED display or through the SteelSeries GG app, which gives you more fine-tune control. Not only can you change the actuation point anywhere between 0.1mm to 4.0mm (in 0.1mm increments), you can also change it per key, so each key can behave differently if you want it to. Along with that, a key press resets based on the travel distance rather than at a fixed point, so you can quickly mash the same key without waiting so long for it to reset. This is a feature that goes well beyond my needs, but for professional gaming, it lets you get just the right response time and actuation you need to perform at the best of your abilities in a given game. For me, I like increasing the actuation just slightly to help prevent wrong key presses when I accidentally hit the neighboring keys while trying to enter a given character.

One key is two keys

But there's even more to these switches. Because they can actuate at multiple points in their travel distance, most of these keys actually let you set up dual actuation. Essentially, you can make it so that the key activates normally at a set point, and then activates a secondary action if you press it further down.

For example, when I played Fortnite, I made it so that the W key activated normally at 1.8mm, but it would trigger another action at 3.8mm where it would press W and Shift simultaneously, which allowed me to sprint in the game using a single key. This is the most obvious use case for something like this, but you can do anything you want with it. You can map almost any action to any key through this second layer of control.

It would be interesting if we could have some form of full analog control with this tech, but I imagine the software work required to map a keyboard key to something like an analog stick would be far too complicated anyway, and I doubt it would have a huge audience. This implementation is already super cool.

Customization

SteelSeries GG lets you change a lot of settings

The SteelSeries Apex Pro TKL (2023), like most other products by the company, can be customized using the SteelSeries Engine, which lives inside the SteelSeries GG app. Here, you have a few options First off, of course, you can customize RGB lighting in the Prism tab. The keyboard has per-key RGB, and you can choose from a few preset effects or design one from the ground up with the colors and animations you want.

You can also head over to the Apps tab, which has apps that integrate with your keyboard to display certain information through RGB lighting or through the OLED display. For example, a Discord app lets you see information about voice activity in a group chat or channel by lighting up the keyboard, or it can display an incoming message on the OLED display. There's also a system monitor app, which shows you the CPU, GPU, and RAM being used by your system at any given time. There's a lot more, like an audio visualizer, a Tidal app, and many game-related apps for more specific uses.

(...)you can assign mouse buttons, media buttons, or macros to almost any key.

Finally, there's the Gear tab, where you can customize more device-specific features. I've already mentioned changing the actuation point and dual actuation, but the SteelSeries GG app actually lets you do even more. Even for a single actuation, you can map any key to a different action. There are also "meta bindings" which let you assign additional actions to each key when you press the SteelSeries key at the same time. By default, this locks the Start menu key and activates the secondary functions in the F9 through F12 keys. However, you can assign mouse buttons, media buttons, or macros to almost any key.

The Gear tab also lets you customize the OLED display with a custom image or animation. You can draw anything you want in black and white in a 128x40 pixel frame, and animations play at 10 frames per second, but it's cool that you're able to do something like this at all.

My problem with SteelSeries GG is how big the app is. The download alone is over 300MB, and I hate how common it has become for these companies to bundle in so much stuff we don't need just to be able to change device settings. There's a lot more beyond customization in this app, and I don't want it. Of course, SteelSeries isn't alone in this practice, but I still wish I could just change the settings for the keyboard and not such a big app using up resources on my PC.

The OLED display menu

If you don't want all the customization options SteelSeries GG offers, though, you can get by with just the OLED display. It's not immediately obvious, but pressing and holding the main button next to the display opens a menu, and here, you get some customization options, too.

Through the OLED display, you can change the brightness of the keyboard's backlight, as well as that of the display itself. You can also change the actuation point for both the primary and secondary bindings for each key, switch between different configuration profiles (up to five can be saved), and even record macros. It's not as robust as the full app, but it's cool to be able to do so much with this small display.

Should you buy the SteelSeries Apex Pro TKL (2023)?

I absolutely fell in love with the SteelSeries Apex Pro TKL while using it. I love typing on these keys thanks to the linear switch and customizable actuation making it just right for my needs. Plus, it's not overly loud for typing, and the build quality as a whole feels fantastic. Some keyboard enthusiasts may scoff at the lack of swappable switches, but considering the custom implementation here, that's a limitation that makes sense, and it's really the only negative I can think of for this hardware. Aside from it not being wireless, though this isn't something that really bothers me in a keyboard.

I don't like that SteelSeries GG is such a bloated app, and hopefully that's something the company can address. I wish the app was more modular, so you can limit the resource usage to just what you need. Otherwise, I love everything about this, and it's undoubtedly one of the best keyboards I've ever used.

You should buy the SteelSeries Apex Pro TKL (2023) if:

• You want a very comfortable typing experience
• You want full customization and rapid actuation for gaming
• You're looking for a relatively compact solution

You should NOT buy the SteelSeries Apex Pro TKL (2023) if:

• You don't want to deal with the company's software
• You want hot-swappable switches
• You need a wireless keyboard
• You want a cushioned wrist rest