Besides, dude, it's not as though we were your family and we
had to kill you because you
married the RD and disgraced us. (It's hard to believe people are still doing that kind of thing here in the 21st century, when we have everything we ever wanted except the little bubble cars, which should be along any time now).
I have an embarrassing love affair with a dell sk-8110 keyboard...
Dude, you really need to get out more! If you can't, at least get one of these, huh?:
Otherwise you may find you have a bunch of 60% keyboards running around. :?D
So that's the thing. If only MS Naturals could keep their crisp original feeling, I think they'd be ideal. But they don't. They go flat and icky and make typing a chore.
Rubber degradation that fast? ... It would be nice to have a clear understanding of how Topre's rubber changes with age... Some rubber goes stiff (more tactile, but increasingly difficult to type on), while other rubber goes limp and loses its tactility entirely in the end... Failure within a month though … I'd expect one to get a few years out of the rubber before it starts to get bad, and with Topre, one would like to imagine for the price that the rubber is carefully selected M&S (or S&M)-grade rubber that will last a long time.
Maybe you didn't notice, but I was referring to MS Natural Keebs there, not Topres. And yes, I went through dozens—
dozens, I tell you—of MSNKs, each lasting only 2–3 months (I type a lot) before I couldn't stand them anymore, and ran out and bought... another MSNK. I imagine lots of people are still doing this.
I'm not one to point fingers ("point fingers", ha, get it?) but it wouldn't surprise me at all if MS
deliberately designed a unique keeb—not merely split, but with distinctive vertical contours, and key shapes and placement, and even sexy
looking—they knew people would fall in love with, get addicted to, then find they had to replace regularly. It's called
planned obsolescence.
I've used my couple of Topre boards quite a bit now, but they show no signs of wearing out. Neither does my Unicomp RD (p/n 96U1114), or even my 1987 IBM Model 00 Quiet Touch. RDs
can be built to stand up to use. Not like MKs, but a lot better than MSNKs. And certainly MS has the engineering know-how to do this, if they wanted to. Which is why I'm guessing they don't.
Wife swears by them.
If she has to be right
by them, at least she's not swearing about them all the time, like mine is. Count your blessings.