Codex Micro (openai.com)

> Is this the reason OpenAI decided to steal Apple hardware secrets?

Of course not.

It isn't meant to sell like hot cakes. Work Louder is the keyboard equivalent of Teenage Engineering. They make expensive toys for silicon valley engineers.

It’s $230 vs. $699? That’s almost exactly a third, not half.

They've been issuing these new tablets to the new people at work, productivity has gone through the roof. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0D2ZD6J2W

Programming is basically now playing with some keystrokes and joysticks :p

ooh Micro 2 is a lot cheaper, but doesn't seem to have individually addressable RGB keys unless I'm mistaken?

$56 premium for the OpenAI skin. :)

Apple must be happy that they let Jony Ive go. What a letdown.

(assuming this meh partnership rebranding had his participation)

Or you could get a bluetooth number pad for $20.

IMHO this is a much better solution.

https://marketplace.elgato.com/product/claude-code-usage-ea7...

I actually have this as a problem with Codex / Claude where I don't know if I have to make a decision .

im reading its not well engineered.

They could've at least made something custom, and claim it was designed with help from GPT 5.6

The price for that HW basically implies it either has sizeable margins or is made with artisan methods.

And literal physical keys to lock computers with!

How long before someone shows a hobby project with a robotic arm and computer vision controlling one of these?

I am only half-joking.

And you would need to spend your day at your keyboard for this to be useful anyway. It's just an input device.

The keyboard community maybe? I think these little macro pads are neat, but I don't have a real use for them either.

As someone with a few unused Teenage Engineering things. The real answer is probably rich tech people who love having things that make people say "I'm not sure who the target audience is".

i'm guessing the primary market for these will be free gifts to enterprise customers at sales meetings.

I see it as another iteration of the wave that had everyone controlling agents directly from a chat app like slack. It isn't actually a more effective way to reach flow state, exchange information faster, and move your development projects forward to greater success, its simply a novel, oddly satisfying input mechanism, at least for the first day.

Which is no different than when the iphone first came out, the basic concept of touch screens was endlessly novel as an input and output device. That novelty did a lot more heavy lifting than what we can now see in hindsight was appropriate, because now many of us won't be able to control the temperature in our cars after the touch screen fails.

I think its the same underlying mechanism that explains why I, a person who has never recorded or mixed audio in a studio, and a person who can know for certain that purchasing a 24 channel mixing console isn't going to faclilitate my career change or even hobby development. But part of me is still viscerally certain that my life would be fuller if I purchased a 24 channel mixing console.

I don't need a legitimate reason to own a tool, or a problem I would fix with it, to fantasize about using that tool.

Its completely pointless yet I still want it. IDK, its the status lights that look fun.

People with too much money to burn and not enough brains to use it on something better

The audience is goobers.

I think people who want to project a 'cracked' (god I hate that word) agentic engineer vibe. But my experience with basically everyone in my immediate vicinity, is that people have no respect or awe for the 'tell the robot to do the thing' workflow.

It’s for twitter AI influencers and general marketing

Thanks for the link, it seems a lot more capable and interesting, to a much better price.