It would be exciting if those "touch bar" keys worked like a stream deck, but they don't. The whole point of a stream deck is that you can put a little picture on each key to remind you what it does. This doesn't do that.
These are just macro keys, except worse because they are not tactile, meaning you have to look away from whatever you're doing to see if you're going to press the right one. I know macro keys are out of style right now, although I have no idea why. Probably because nobody can ever remember what macros they have set up - hence why the stream deck was such a good idea. But still, macros are a useful thing to have if you're trying to be the 0.0001% of streamers that manage to make a profit.
I'm glad there's a little LCD in the "touch bar" but they would have been way better off if they had added some multimedia keys or a number pad. It's not hard to reprogram a keyboard to do whatever you want. Corsair could have just made the keyboard more roomy, slapped their branding on a freeware app, and called it a day.
If Corsair was feeling extra saucy, then they could give the users a keyboard profile that quickly turns the entire keyboard into programmable shortcuts and just use the existing LEDs to color code the keys. Or embed and LCD into the touch screen and turn it into a stream deck kind of thing. Odds are if you're streaming, then you already have a dedicated keyboard and at minimum a mouse. So you have all these extra built-in inputs sitting on your desk, they might as well be doing something useful.
I think my personal ideal is if they added a standard tenkey number pad, and embedded the stream deck oled screens into numbers 1-9.
Good idea for brand synergy, but the execution needs a lot of work.
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