The NuPhy Air75 V2 is the most complete low-profile wireless keyboard I’ve tested under $150 — and the first one I’d recommend to a non-enthusiast without spending fifteen minutes on caveats first. At $119.95 base, it outspecifies the Logitech MX Mechanical Mini on software and matches it on build quality, at a lower price.
Verdict First
Nine out of ten desk setups, this keyboard just works. On the tenth — specifically the one running macOS — it occasionally freezes for one to three seconds before resuming as if nothing happened. The bug is real, intermittent, and unacknowledged in official release notes at time of writing.
Windows or Linux: stop reading, buy it.
macOS: read “The Catch” first, then decide.
Build and First Impressions of the NuPhy Air75 V2
The aluminum top plate is genuinely good — not good-for-$120, just good. Rigid, no chassis flex, minimal hollow sound when typing off the keys. The frosted plastic bottom half is less impressive and shows fingerprints from roughly two feet away (my desk is glass, which did not help), but it doesn’t affect typing feel.
At 13.5mm height — down from 16mm on the original Air75 — this is a board you can use without a wrist rest without consequence. I have medium-length fingers and the edge profile is comfortable even during extended sessions. The three-angle tilt adjustment via foldable feet covers the range most people actually need.
The default colorway ships with gray modifiers, yellow space bar, red Enter, and teal Escape. I found this jarring for the first three days. By week two I had stopped noticing. (I have since told two people it was a deliberate aesthetic choice, which is arguably true.)
Typing Feel on Low-Profile Switches
Stock Gateron low-profile switches — included in the base $119.95 price — are competent and nothing more. The tactile brown variant has a bump that exists mostly in the spec sheet rather than under your fingers.
NuPhy’s proprietary switch lineup is where this keyboard earns its score. Aloe (linear, 35gf actuation, factory-lubed) and Cowberry (tactile, 45gf) are both noticeably better than the Gaterons for sustained typing, at an added cost of $15–25 at checkout. Spend the money. The switches make the biggest difference on this board, full stop.
Actuation point on the low-profile switches is 1.5mm — or 1.8mm, I kept rechecking the spec sheet because NuPhy lists slightly different numbers for different switch variants, and I confused myself twice before settling on “it bottoms out at 2.5mm total travel, which feels like a laptop keyboard but with proper key spacing.” Adjustment takes about four hours of use before muscle memory catches up.
The Wireless Stack: 1000Hz and Why It Matters
1000Hz polling over 2.4GHz is not marketing copy. I connected the Air75 V2 via 2.4GHz dongle and ran it through several Valorant sessions before writing this review. Input latency is indistinguishable from my wired boards under real-use conditions. This matters more than the spec sheet suggests — most wireless keyboards cap at 125Hz, which introduces 8ms of input lag at the polling level alone. The Air75 V2’s 2.4GHz mode eliminates that gap entirely.
Bluetooth connects up to four devices simultaneously via a three-key combo to switch between them. The transition takes approximately two seconds. I swapped between a work MacBook, personal MacBook, iPad, and gaming PC fourteen times in a single Wednesday stress-testing multi-device pairing — the switching was reliable every time.
Battery life hits 220 hours over Bluetooth with backlight off. In practice, charging once every three weeks. The RGB lighting is well-implemented for a low-profile board — the side LED bars show caps lock status and battery level through color coding, which means you rarely need to look at software to know your board’s state.
VIA: The Software Win Nobody Writes About
NuPhy shipped the original Air75 with “NuPhy Studio,” their in-house configuration tool. It worked. The Air75 V2 drops it entirely in favor of VIA and QMK.
VIA is the open standard that the mechanical keyboard community converged on over the past four years: browser-based or desktop app, cross-platform, real-time key remapping without firmware flashing, zero cloud account required. Reassigning Caps Lock to a layer switch takes under three minutes. Every keyboard builder already has VIA open in a tab somewhere.
For a $120 keyboard from a Chinese brand to ship with full QMK/VIA support is the kind of product decision that doesn’t show up in spec comparison tables but makes a meaningful difference to anyone who’s spent time configuring a high-end board. Credit where it’s due.
Tom’s Guide notes the same VIA strength in their full review, if you want a second opinion on software specifically.
The Catch
The macOS bug. On Sonoma and Sequoia, a subset of users — size unknown, but the NuPhy community thread is long enough to constitute evidence — report the keyboard freezing for one to three seconds at random intervals. Not reliably reproducible. Not consistently occurring. Firmware updates may address it; NuPhy has not published an official fix at time of writing.
It happened to me twice in the first week, then stopped. I updated firmware on both occasions, so one update probably fixed it, or the keyboard decided to behave, or something about the macOS scheduler changed. I genuinely do not know. Mechanical keyboards are occasionally haunted.
On Windows across several months: zero issues.
Who This Keyboard Is For
The Air75 V2 fits engineers and productivity workers who want wireless done properly: no polling-rate tax for 2.4GHz, long battery, good software, solid build. It’s not the right board if you want magnetic switches for competitive gaming (look at the MCHOSE Ace 68 V2 for that), and it’s overkill if you’re buying a first mechanical keyboard and have no interest in customization.
If you’re already configuring boards in VIA and want something low-profile with proper wireless: this is the answer under $150.
真香 moment arrived somewhere in week three, when I stopped thinking of it as “the keyboard I’m evaluating” and started thinking of it as “my keyboard.” The Aloe switches had a lot to do with that. The yellow space bar, less so — but I’ve stopped noticing it.
Buy it on Amazon: Ionic White (Gateron Brown) | Lunar Grey (Gateron Brown)
