I really like the colours of the Razer Chroma Black Widow and how you can customize it. I'm not a gamer so I don't use the in-game features. I mainly use the keyboard to write code. I think the lights are fun, and I like how you can program the different effects with any colour using RGB or hex values. I don't love the typeface, e.g. the R looks like an upside down L, but I'm sure it appeals to its target demographic.



The software is fairly easy to use (when it's working right). You can choose from a variety of profiles. I like how there are so many options but it would be nice to see even more. My top 2 are wave and reactive.



The clicky sound is very loud, so if you want to take this into an office environment, you may have some people complain about the noise. Razer uses their own proprietary switches for which they have videos so you can hear the sound it makes. I bought the Clicky version which has green switches—there were no other option available on Amazon at the time.



I have limited experience with mechanical keyboards and I'm a fan of the typing experience on the Razer Chroma Black Widow. I tend to make more typos than usual with this keyboard, but it'll just take some time adjusting.



The Mac drivers are really flakey. I guess I should be happy that they even offer Mac drivers, since most of the RGB mechanical keyboards I've seen do not. It doesn't work well if you have multiple users signed in to your Mac. I've had a number of issues getting the keyboard to pick up my profiles, including having the Synapse software loading blank after logging in, being able to log in but my profiles not be loaded in Synapse (but they're in the menu bar selector but they don't work). A workaround is to open Activity Monitor and end the tasks for all of the Razer services running in the background, including RzUpdater and RzDeviceEngine, for all users (not just yours). I'm wondering how reliable it will be without an internet connection, as you need to be logged in to access your profiles. It's also somewhat concerning because Razer may choose to abandon this keyboard, and if it does, will it still work? The internet speaks of offline mode but I haven't seen that anywhere. My review is all very short-term, so I hope to see Razer supporting the keyboard for a long time.



Another issue is that the function keys sometimes stop working. I've mapped F8 to show my desktop and that doesn't seem to work. For some reason unplugging it and plugging it back in seems to have fixed it, but there's a lot of trial and error with getting the lighting profiles to work and the function key mappings programmed in the OS to be picked up. If you use only a single user, then you will have less problems since you won't have duplicate Razer services running for each user. I'm guessing it gets confused easily and can't distinguish between the instances.



I was excited to learn about the SDK for developers to use, but unfortunately it's Windows only. The developers' portal seems very set up and welcoming to new developers, but when you contact them asking questions, you get no response. I would be happy to run a VM and develop in Windows if it means I can integrate whatever I do into my Mac somehow but it compiles to .exe so I imagine that the SDK is available for Windows only, even though they offer Mac drivers. It's been a week and I haven't heard back from them yet. I'm guessing that they promote their SDK but they don't actually support it, even though the website will lead you to believe otherwise. I can't see this being a platform that developers will choose to develop for given the lack of responsiveness from the Razer SDK people, so if you're excited about all the integrations into your games, you may be disappointed.



Overall a great effort by Razer. I like the keyboard, it's fun. The technical glitches are annoying but I just go on a rampage and force quit all process related to it, and unplug it and plug it back in, and eventually after a few attempts, all is working as expected. I can't imagine this being an enjoyable experience for non-technical people, but if you're cool with that, and you're on a Mac, the experience will still be fun.