My Stream Deck is a productivity dream and now it's a Prime Day bargain, too

Elgato Stream Deck Promo
Elgato Stream Deck Promo (Image credit: Elgato)

I've been using an Elgato Stream Deck for a few months now and it might be the best thing I bought in a good long while. I don't stream on Twitch or YouTube, but I do have a ton of shortcuts that I could never remember the keyboard combos for and this thing is a game-changer. At just $100, the 15-button Stream Deck is a bargain and it could change your productivity game.

Magic buttons everywhere

For the uninitiated, the Stream Deck was first devised as a way to give streamers a way to quickly and easily do things while playing games, building keyboards, and whatever it is the kids do on stream these days. They could press a button and an overlay would appear, for example. Press another one and their microphone would be muted. All pretty great when you need ease of use while concentrating on earning money. But while I don't stream, I do spend my day sitting at a computer and I too would rather not have to fight with keyboard shortcuts that I never remember while trying to earn money. I might not have blue hair, but there are things streamers and I have in common.

Like our reliance on our Stream Decks.

Glancing over at my Stream Deck right now I have a couple of buttons that kick me straight into specific OmniFocus perspectives. I have others that start and stop Toggl time trackers — while displaying the current elapsed time on the button — as well as others that put my Mac to sleep and fire up Fantastical and Drafts.

Because Stream Deck is app-aware, the buttons and their functions change whenever I'm in specific apps, too. It's all rather clever and while the individual actions don't seem huge, they all save time and mental load in the aggregate. I couldn't be without my Stream Deck so I'm here to tell you that this Prime Day deal is one you should definitely check out.

If you've been holding off picking one of these things up, now is the time to strike! I (almost) guarantee it'll make you more productive, especially if you're like me and can never remember the fifteen keypresses needed to get a function to work in that app you use.

We're now getting to the business end of Prime Day so make sure to check our ongoing collection of the very best Apple Prime Day deals throughout the day. Be sure to check back before making a purchase elsewhere, too, you never know when the chance to save some cash could present itself.

Oliver Haslam
Contributor

Oliver Haslam has written about Apple and the wider technology business for more than a decade with bylines on How-To Geek, PC Mag, iDownloadBlog, and many more. He has also been published in print for Macworld, including cover stories. At iMore, Oliver is involved in daily news coverage and, not being short of opinions, has been known to 'explain' those thoughts in more detail, too. Having grown up using PCs and spending far too much money on graphics card and flashy RAM, Oliver switched to the Mac with a G5 iMac and hasn't looked back. Since then he's seen the growth of the smartphone world, backed by iPhone, and new product categories come and go. Current expertise includes iOS, macOS, streaming services, and pretty much anything that has a battery or plugs into a wall. Oliver also covers mobile gaming for iMore, with Apple Arcade a particular focus. He's been gaming since the Atari 2600 days and still struggles to comprehend the fact he can play console quality titles on his pocket computer.