The entire case looks like someone (new to doing it) made a homemade mold of an IBM and cast their own.
The LED area looks like it was slapped together with little care for style (ever heard of a graphics designer?), the indents for the pointer stick buttons look like no one gave damn to clean the area up, and even the plastic itself looks cheap. I'm not saying it's a bad keyboard, but the case looks very second rate to an IBM. It matches their website well.
There's actually a reason the EnduraPro cutouts are like that. It's not all good though.
The original M13 basically used a Model M case that had a very large cutout on the upper half and additional bracing on the lower half to hold the button assembly. What this did is made the lower edge of the upper half
incredibly weak. (Which is why I insist on extreme caution when rebuilding and repairing M13's.) There was never enough reinforcement added because there simply was nowhere to put it. And given it's stiff ABS, yes, it is incredibly fragile and easy to break. And if it does, the buttons are screwed up because they also rest on that weak as hell tiny band of plastic left.
By contrast, the EnduraPro uses the M2-styled chassis where the upper half of the chassis is completely cut away. The end result of this is that the upper half of the chassis only has to carry the hinge action across a better spread and doesn't reproduce that fragile lower strand of leftover plastic. (No surprise, the dies for it are actually from Lexmark and date to around 1994-1995 - I forget which IBM keyboard it was. Damned rare one though.)
Honestly I suspect the fact is that they're still using the
original dies and molds for the chassis, and it's not like these parts don't accumulate wear and tear over time. But they're also very costly to replace. TBH, I somewhat prefer the design of the EnduraPro from an engineering standpoint but really do not like it from a look and feel one - even if it was as pristine as a pre-production cleaned up by hand.
As for the LED area.. yeah.. I really hate the way it looks. Especially the graphic indicators. I don't mind the Unicomp logo itself, but the full color version feels garish on beige or black. I'd much rather have a two-color one with worded indicators and a black-and-white render of the Unicomp logo. Or at least worded indicators - gods how I hate the graphics they used.
As for Das, mine is well over a year old and looks just great. It's a nice keyboard and I personally feel it has an undeserved bad reputation (at least the older ones).
Typed on Mk1 and Mk2 Das. Every bit of the reputation is deserved. The Mk1 felt absolutely awful (yet somehow ended up with keycaps that weren't total fail.) The Mk2 felt much better but there's zero question it was overpriced at a $130+ MSRP when you could get the
exact same keyboard with an Fn layer for
less money. And Mk3... $130 for mediocre build quality coupled with the lowest quality keycaps on the market according to more reviews than I care to count AND misleading marketing? (The box photo has the
wrong layout and doesn't show the 1x Alt/Win/Menu/Ctrl, it shows the 1.25x!)
Frankly, I'm happy with a marketing company in the vein of Razer not selling more rebadged stuff to an army they've convinced that it's the same as a Model M. (Seriously, read some of the reviews sometime..)
