Mechanical keyboard maker Keychron is going all in on wireless with its new Q Ultra series — which will have ZMK (rather than QMK) firmware — launched Monday at CES 2026.
The Q Ultra series will be, according to Keychron, the "first mass-produced ZMK mechanical keyboard series of its kind, offering up to 660 hours of battery life in 8K polling rate in wireless mode."
Yes, you read that correctly — 660 hours of battery life with an 8K polling rate, thanks to the ZMK firmware. ZMK is, like QMK, open source — but it uses a different license (the MIT license), and is developed with wireless keyboards in mind (QMK doesn't natively support any wireless microcontrollers; QMK-based wireless keyboards like Keychron's Q1 HE or the Wobkey Rainy 75 Pro use dual- or hybrid microcontrollers, and still need to be wired for configuration). Anyway, all this to say that ZMK is (much) more power-efficient than QMK, as evidenced by the fact that Keychron's upcoming Q Series will have 660-hour, 8K polling rate battery life.
