alt Hacker NewsThere's just no way they could have done something like, a split dual purple-gray-gold tri-tone double shot keycaps on lubed gasketed Cherry ultra low profile tactile in black nickel cold hammer forged milled blasted steel chassis with full QMK compatibility and quad nRF53 mesh wireless networking, full wide QCIF microdisplays and native GX16 coiled cable support. They're a Japanese PC peripherals company. Not a hype-revenue-cashflowmaxxing dream YouTuber multi joint venture. The whole keyboard industry is optimized for the latter, and I doubt it can support a real company not subsidized by hype sustainably over time anyway.
Typed on my HHKB Lite 2
Replies
mech422 • today at 3:14 AM
You forgot the Stabs!
The survivors in the industry were the non-enthusiast players.
Cherry was selling mechanical switch keyboards for POS and specialty applications for decades before the enthusiast market emerged.
Unicomp was addressing the market of terminal-lockin customers who needed a replacement for the IBM Model M (frequently 122-key version) that had finally popped its last rivet at 23 years old.
They didn't have to chase trends, minimizing risk and keeping scale high.
Mid-price enthusiast players are under the risk of irrelevance from cheaper/better competitors. The higher-end of the market-- the Steelseries, Corsair, Razer, Das Keyboards-- are being perpetually undercut by the Redragons, Akkos, Aulas, and a bunch of AliExpress/Amazon no-names. They might be able to hold some ground by virtue of "You can get it for $89 today at Micro Centre and not have to dig into it too hard", but they're very interchangeable (maybe RGB and programming ecosystems matter for some)
Boutique vendors might be able to keep things running by going from trend to trend or relying on a small, dedicated audience-- group buys where everything is pretty much prepaid are probably better than trying to sell at retail and end up on a pile of unsold stock.
But I wonder how far off we are from "bespoke to order"-- a wizard with a bunch of knobs but some constraints, and it generates a stack of files that get forwarded to PCB and CNC/3D-printing jobbers, and in 8 weeks you get a parcel from Shenzhen with an assembled keyboard.
I'd suspect right now, the small-scale inefficiencies are what holds it back. It's doable but probably too expensive to make a viable product out of.