A five-board flagship lineup running ZMK isn't a niche move; it's a market signal that an open-source firmware that lived in DIY-wireless territory for half a decade has crossed into mainstream-prebuilt anchor status. The vendor side has finally caught up with where the cohort already was.
Ask almost anyone — a forum regular, a YouTube comment section, a Discord server for people who just bought their first mechanical keyboard — what board to get, and you'll hear the same answer. This is how that happened.
Computex 2026 (May 20–24) was the week hall-effect stopped being a gaming-peripheral curiosity and walked into the same room as enthusiast-grade chassis. Two boards made that argument concrete.
Keychron used CES 2026 to announce the Q Ultra line — Q1 through Q6 prebuilts running ZMK rather than QMK/VIA. The 660h battery claim is the headline; the firmware swap is the actual story.