Photo by Dan Seifert / The Verge
Like many great products, the Elgato Stream Deck wasn’t exactly a new idea.
When the very first one debuted six years ago this month, we instantly compared it to Art Lebedev’s legendary Optimus Maximus keyboard, which promised an array of swirling OLED screens under your fingertips an entire decade earlier. Razer, too, pioneered LCD keys before their time, tacking them onto a keyboard and the company’s very first Blade laptop.
But today, we’re celebrating the simple genius of Elgato — the company that finally turned them into a viable product by making them relatively cheap, comfy, and most importantly: peripheral.
Art Lebedev and Razer both believed we wanted a new keyboard that morphs, where our primary computing input mechanism…
