A-OK: The Apple Ortholinear Keyboard

This is my DIY retrofuture Apple Ortholinear Keyboard

DIY case made of Rosewood and acrylic. PCB and Plate are XD75. Caps are uniform profile so I can use my beloved Colemak. I hole punched some vinyl to make colored labels to hide the incorrect labels for the modifiers.

I found a crappy Apple Keyboard II M0487 at salvage place. It’s not mechanical, SMK Sliders over membrane…

…but the keycaps are Alps mount and uniform profile. They have these weird corner pin stabilizer things that have to be cut out though.

I bought an XD75 PCB and Alps plate from Aliexpress (~$45 USD total), but since I have the 6u spacebar and 2u keys, I needed to mod plate and PCB with new holes

For the 3 modified key positions, I have to wire and shrinkwrap the leads to avoid hitting PCB ground

Used some orange Alps I had, and added a locking Alps for toggling Colemak/Qwerty

Backplate is hand-snapped and drilled acrylic, which I soda blasted to diffuse LEDs

XD75 has nice backlight options, I went with rainbow to sorta match the old Apple logo.

5 degree case tilt and love those uniform profile caps