AZIO Cascade Slim Low-Profile Mechanical Keyboard
It’s great to see the availability of several high-quality low-profile mechanical keyboards. These are perfect boards for people who have been using laptop keyboards for years, and want to migrate over (or back, in my case) to the world of mechanical keyboards.
Last year, I tried several low-profile keyboards from Nuphy, Keychron, and Logitech, and generally liked all of them. But I ended up keeping the AZIO Cascade Slim. A year later, I’m still using it with my Mac mini. I won’t do a full review here - you can find several useful ones on YouTube - but I’ll say that of all the low-profile boards I tried at the time, the AZIO had the most premium feel. It has a solid aluminum base, a great sound profile1 with a dual layer of silicone and EVA foam dampers, and extremely smooth and comfortable shine-through ABS keycaps. AZIO is a boutique keyboard company - you can tell that they care about every detail. And it’s a good deal at $99.
I bought the version with Gateron Low-Profile Brown switches (KS-33), in the Forest Light colorway.
Most people will find this board to be perfectly useable right out-of-the-box. However, I am:
- a sloppy typist
- a programmer
- and a gamer
So I lightly customized it.
I bought some Womier low-profile shine-through PBT keycaps. Even though I love the feel of the AZIO caps, I had a tough time typing accurately with their cylindrical profiles2, whereas the Womier spherical profiles help me land my sloppy typing on the correct key. Since AZIO uses an offset alignment for their stabilizers, I left the stabilized AZIO keycaps in place. They’re about 1mm lower than the new keycaps, but it works fine for me, and I kinda like the resulting multi-tone colorway.
I am constantly hitting the PG keys accidentally, which is especially frustrating in Visual Studio Code. To mitigate this a bit, I remapped the PGUP/PGDN keys and Home/End keys using the built-in MacOS key mapper and this handy online tool: https://hidutil-generator.netlify.app/. Now I tend to accidentally hit Home and End instead, which are more benign mistakes in VS Code.
I also often accidentally hit the “Screenshot” key just above backspace. You end up in “screenshot mode”, and need to press ESC to get out. This key seems to be hard-wired to send “Shift-CMD-4”, which is one of the the MacOS screenshot shortcuts, so I simply disabled that shortcut in Settings (you can get more versatile screenshots using Shift-CMD-5 anyway).
For gaming and faster navigation, I replaced the brown switches for all of the modifier keys, navigation keys, ESC, and WASD with red switches3, per inspiration from this reddit post. I also connect the keyboard via USB instead of Bluetooth. The responsiveness is excellent, and with red switches on WASD, it works a great compact gaming board.
Wishlist for a Future Version
I don’t know it AZIO ever plans to update this keyboard, but if they do, I’d like to see these improvements:
- Battery life seems fine with RGB turned off, but it takes a second or two to wake up when sleeping on bluetooth. I wish this was instant. (Can anyone match Apple or Logitech’s secret sauce for long battery life and instant wake-up?)
- The right column of keys, which is pretty standard on low-profile 75% boards, is frustrating for sloppy typists.
A fix would be to remove the column (matching the Apple keyboard layout) or add some spacing next to the column, similar to layouts you see on full-sized 75% boards, like the
Keychron Q1 . - Instead of having to customize the keymapping in MacOS, it would be nicer to have some official AZIO software for this (including macros, layers, etc).
- A standardized stabilizer arrangement similar to Nuphy and Keychron would allow for more keycap options.
Recommended
If you currently use a laptop-style keyboard and want to try a mechanical board, or if you are looking for a mechanical board with a short key throw that types quietly and doesn’t require a wrist-rest, the AZIO Cascade Slim is a great option.
Footnotes
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For the kids asking “does it th0k!?”, the answer is no, you won’t get much of a thocky sound from any low profile board, let alone one without bezels. But it does have a very pleasant, satisfying sound, especially from the space bar, no doubt enabled by the excellent internal dampening. And it’s quiet enough (IMHO) to use in an office workspace. ↩
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It would be fun to compare this board to the standard-sized AZIO Cascade. I wonder if I would have the same sloppy-typing issues with their full-sized keycaps and switches? ↩
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Low-profile switches are really difficult to remove, so I recommend using a specialized titanium puller like this one. ↩