The Front Of Cherry’s Latest Keyboard Can Wipe Your USB Sticks And Watches

I’ve been playing with the latest Cherry MX 6.0 mechanical keyboard for the last few days, and it’s a nice, well-built keyboard. I’ll have a review up later this week, but there is one big point people might want to know about.

Image courtesy of Cherry MX

You’ll notice in the picture above that there’s a very sizeable arm rest. It’s nice to rest your hands on. It’s also quite large and has plenty of room to maybe rest your keys or something small in between your wrists.

But let me stop you there. Because if you thought that space might be nice for putting objects, you might want to think again. The operating manual for the Cherry MX Board 6.0 warns that there’s a magnet in the front of the keyboard where the palm rest attaches.

“There is a magnet of strength N48H on the front of the keyboard for attaching the palm rest,” the user manual says. “Do not put any storage media such as SD cards or external hard drives, or mechanical watches near the front of the keyboard.”

It doesn’t say smart watches, only mechanical ones — so don’t leave your old-school wrist watches lying on the keyboard or anything. And just to remind you, the manual has this in bold:

The magnet in the keyboard can wipe storage media and damage mechanical watches

Well then. That’s good to know.

It’s worth noting that the Cherry MX 6.0 is targeted at people with supremely quick typing speeds, programmers and those who are heavy, heavy keyboard users. It’s not specifically targeted at gamers and it doesn’t come with any gaming-specific software, although I can imagine the lack of software might actually be supremely appealing for a lot of gamers who take their keyboard around to various events (the Zowie line of mice are hugely attractive for precisely this reason).

But it does have a magnet that could wipe your USB sticks. So, uh, be careful.