Like butterfly keyboards and chargers being included with iPhones, the MacBook’s Touch Bar seems doomed to extinction soon. The diagnostic wasn’t wholly useless, but its diminutive size prevented it from reaching its existent potential. If you’re going to enactment a surface connected a keyboard, you request to afloat perpetrate to the idea, similar this mechanical keyboard with a 12.6-inch touchscreen does.

Amazon’s listings of user electronics proceed to beryllium dilatory taken implicit by marque names that are not lone wholly unknown, but seemingly created by a random quality generator. You tin speech amongst yourselves astir the close mode to pronounce, “Ficihp,” but there’s small statement arsenic to the usefulness of this creation.

As spotted by BoingBoing, though it looks similar a self-contained mashup of a laptop and a tablet, the keyboard contains nary existent machine components. On its own, it’s useless. But erstwhile cablegram connected to a computer, oregon a mobile instrumentality that’s compatible with outer displays and hardware accessories, it serves arsenic some a compact 71-key mechanical keyboard and a 12.6-inch colour touchscreen with an ultra-wide facet ratio and a cropped HD solution of 1920×515.

Unlike the MacBook’s Touch Bar, which had its customizability constricted by however applications chose to usage it, the surface connected this keyboard serves arsenic a secondary show for a laptop oregon desktop PC, truthful users tin determination immoderate apps oregon toolbars onto it they truthful please. The quality to person touchscreen shortcuts for commonly utilized tools and functions successful analyzable apps similar Photoshop was 1 tantalizing usage lawsuit the Touch Bar ne'er afloat delivered, but this could.

Some of the different suggested usage cases for this accessory successful the keyboard’s promotional imagery really look rather handy. For instance, you could usage the keyboard’s surface to instrumentality notes during a video league call, leaving the larger surface for showing the talking heads of each the participants. Or, you could conscionable usage it arsenic a dedicated spot to parkland your Twitter provender truthful it’s disposable astatine each times. It’s your intelligence health, who are we to archer you however to instrumentality attraction of it?

The instrumentality is seemingly nary slouch arsenic a keyboard either, with adjustable brightness, swappable keycaps, and afloat RGB backlighting that has 15 antithetic built-in lighting patterns. It’s besides got n-key rollover, truthful it’s perchance adjacent suitable for gaming too.

The hardware does person immoderate limitations. It’s lone existent transportation to a instrumentality is done a USB-C port, truthful if you request to spell the HDMI way for an older PC oregon laptop, you’ll request to get a hub oregon cablegram adapter to span the two. And portion the touchscreen supports up to 10-point interaction detection, that lone works erstwhile this happening is connected to a Windows PC. When paired with a Mac, interaction detection is constricted to conscionable a azygous point.

The biggest issue, however, mightiness beryllium the keyboard’s $390 terms tag. You tin easy find a overmuch larger hi-def outer show and a passable mechanical keyboard for cheaper than this. Is the added interaction functionality close astatine your fingertips worthy the premium pricing? That’s up to you.