I love hanging out in the MK world. But let's face it, it's also full of eccentrically, sometimes epically, picky people.
I'm not saying you have to be on the autism scale to enjoy MKs. However, it's a well-known fact that people with obsessive personalities are often drawn to small, precise things—and what's an MK a collection of? Yep. The colors and textures of of key caps, the loudness and tone of clicks, the exact heights at which switches actuate... For sure, it's fun stuff—but for some people, it can involve pathological levels of preoccupation. That's just a fact.
Social media notwithstanding, typing is also an intrinsically solitary activity. So it's not unusual for people who arrange their lives around something like MKs to be essentially solitary, people who've arranged everything in their lives just so. If something upsets that balance—even if they just
perceive it that way—they can lash out unpredictably and irrationally. If something they've hyper-focused on isn't how they expected it to be, they may feel like their world's careening out of control.
So you have to take this kind of thing with a grain of salt. When you get involved in a community like this, you'll almost certainly come in contact with people to whom MKs mean more than virtually anything else, including other people.
And if you take the extraordinary step of designing and producing your
own MK-related products, and offering them to this community, you're opening yourself up to everyone's expectations, no matter how unrealistic or potentially volatile they may be.
You can just imagine the rants customer service people at keyboard companies regularly receive. But those people aren't functioning as members of a KB community. They're hired to handle problems and complaints all day, every day. When a customer's irate, they can isolate themselves from the emotion, open the protocol policies their company has issued to them, follow the numbers, then forget about it and take the next call. XMIT doesn't have that luxury; he's one of us.
So I think it's important to keep in mind that nothing really unusual is going on here. It's just the context in which it's happening.
With any new product—not to mention, one that's
this kind of new—there will always be people who like it and people who don't. The people who don't may have legitimate complaints (e.g. obvious defects, shipping damage), or they may have created an inaccurate or unrealistic image of the product in their minds. Or it may just work or look different from what they'd prefer. And as it's pointed out here every day: Typing feel and visual aesthetics are highly subjective.
XMIT's a very smart guy. I'm sure he realized what he might be wading into when he decided to take this project on. He did it anyway, and he's being as open and accommodating as he can.
Since I plugged in my XMIT board, I've gotten nothing but pleasure from it. (I'm typing on it now.) To me, it looks, feels, and operates just great, and knowing it has HE switches is a true geeky thrill. The facts that it's also my only RGB board, and my only board with a natural wood case, are just bonuses.
No, I didn't expect it to be perfect. The case is a bit rough here and there (it is, after all, natural wood), and the spacebar's noisier than I expected. But remember, these are
virtual prototypes of a kind of board few of us have ever seen, much less gotten to use. Despite the quirks, IMHO we're lucky to get in on the first wave of them. And XMIT clearly values our feedback, as long as we're able to communicate it constructively. To me, that's a thrill too, to be involved such an interesting board's evolution.
So I'm willing to support XMIT however I can, so he can keep moving forward. I'm sorry not everyone feels that way—but unfortunately, some people will always be so wrapped up in their own precise little worlds, you can't make them step back and see a bigger picture. There isn't a single entrepreneur in the world who doesn't have to deal with that. It's the reason most of us spend our lives working for other people and letting
them take up the slack.
I echo the sentiment that the switches are light. I have the 70g, and it fells like a step lighter than any MX black I've ever typed on (aka distinctly NOT 70g). I assume this is because the nature of the switches are different. It would make logical sense that the weight of a spring would lead to a universal resistance across any medium, but this Hall Effect board is definitely proof that that is not true...
That's a great, objective viewpoint. As far as I know, after reliability, HE switches are
all about smoothness. How much smoother can you get than simply having to move a magnet a few millimeters perpendicular to an electrical current?
To me, these switches's pressure falls between that of MX Reds and Blacks. They're light enough not to be fatiguing, but have enough resistance that you can type without slamming them down. If you find yourself bottoming out anyway, I suggest it's just a matter of practice, allowing yourself to type with less effort, just skimming across the keys.
Yes, you'll miss some characters in the process of learning to do it. But resist the temptation to whine. Like many things in life that take some effort, the benefits are worth the trouble.
I play five musical instruments, BTW—and I can tell you that learning to type lightly, without wasted effort or strain, was a
lot easier to learn than any of them. :?)
