What gripes do you have about the keyboard industry?

[HungerMechanic]

You can have absolutely any type of keyboard you want, as long as it's small. Occasionally a full-size keyboard or DIY kit will show up somewhere, but then it's just a bog-standard full-size layout.

I can't easily think of another industry where the enthusiasts are so heavily grouped on a single, lighter side of the spectrum. But when it comes to keyboards, the layperson's keyboard is like a Rolls Royce (albeit a really cheaply-built, rattly knock-off), with numpad, media keys, and no need to resort to convoluted layers and forced extra key-presses. Anyone who wants to customise their keyboard beyond that has little choice but to look downwards.

I just want to reiterate what Volny said about the shoddy build quality of pre-built MX keyboards.

Some of us are indeed looking for TKL and full-size keyboards, and pre-builts dominate that space.

Volny compared full-size pre-builts to a Rolls Royce [in design] "albeit a really cheaply-built, rattly knock-off."

That's so true! The design characteristics of large keyboards can be quite ample. But imagine a pre-built MX tactile full-size keyboard. You'll have:

-spring ping
-relatively high-pitched switch noise
-audible sandiness and scratchiness

-inconsistent sound profile across the keyboard
-ticking stabilizers

-large stabilized keys wobble or go angles other than flat

-crudely sculpted keycaps with horrible gamer fonts or boring legends that will wear away


-inconsistent factory spring weights


What's the point of going mechanical, for a superior typing experience, if that's what a factory tactile board is like. No wonder most of the world is on rubber-domes.

If I'm going to pay 5-10x times an office rubber-dome, I want it to offer something that exudes quality out-of-the-box. I haven't even gotten into how bad keycaps used to be.

It's getting better, largely thanks to the custom scene. You see more and more factory double-shot PBT, Cherry-profile, lubed stabilizers, non-Cherry switches, detachable-cable keyboards.

So thank-you custom scene for pushing this. I'm typing on a custom light tactile keyboard, and my Filco Majestouch 2 seems so crude by comparison. At least those MX Browns are worn-in now, and it has some nice DCS keycaps.

[Leslieann]

My biggest gripe is with the sheer lack of diversity. The focus is so heavy on aesthetics that functionality seems continually minimised. You can have absolutely any type of keyboard you want, as long as it's small. Occasionally a full-size keyboard or DIY kit will show up somewhere, but then it's just a bog-standard full-size layout. While unorthodox and innovative layouts abound in the smaller form factors, almost no one seems to try and innovate or improve upon the full-size layout (let alone expand on it).

I can't easily think of another industry where the enthusiasts are so heavily grouped on a single, lighter side of the spectrum. Most people own a run-of-the-mill bike. Then on one side you get expensive, ultra-light road racing bikes that have been stripped of mudguards, kickstands, or even gears or brakes. On the other side you get expensive mountain bikes with extra tread, extra suspension, extra heft. On another side you get commuter bikes with panniers and rear-view mirrors or child wagons, or tandems, etc. The layperson's bike sits somewhere in the middle of all that, with various niches available that sprout from there, for those who are willing to pay them. But when it comes to keyboards, the layperson's keyboard is like a Rolls Royce (albeit a really cheaply-built, rattly knock-off), with numpad, media keys, and no need to resort to convoluted layers and forced extra key-presses. Anyone who wants to customise their keyboard beyond that has little choice but to look downwards.

I guess many forgot why small keyboards became a thing, it gives you room for your mouse if you're right handed. Companies didn't make them so the community made their own and if you're spending a ton to make a limited production run you may as well make them nice while you're at it for a little more.

Almost every hobby space is this way.
Small form factor computers where you can spend $250-$500 on a case the size of a toaster (often runs as hot as one as well).
Water cooled computers where you can spend $700 just on colored fittings.
3d printers where the hobbyists can spend more on the controller alone than most spent on their entire printer.
Rc cars you have cheap store stuff and then you have the racers with full carbon fiber, milled aluminum everything.
I don't even want to know what model train people are spending.



As for the lack of diversity, is there?
Keyboards are commoditized, they have been for decades. they've been reduced to the absolute barest of essentials and yet for all that we have how many different sizes and looks. It's not a lack of diversity, the market is actually flooded. There has NEVER been a better time for keyboards. Ever. Well, except for the fact that everything is sold out and back ordered.

The lack of diversity is only because among all these boards, they all lack this one extremely specific feature you, and possibly only you, want. The fact that you can distill your options down that far, on something so commoditized is a testament to that diversity, not a lack of it.


Edit: For the record, there's really no less TKL and full size custom options than in the past it's just that there's so many more smaller options it makes them look like there is little choice. It has always been relatively slim pickings on them because that's not what drives this hobby.

[kajahtaa]

Zero gripes.

Ok.. the Muppets at Keyreative can DIAF.

That's it.

[Volny]

The lack of diversity is only because among all these boards, they all lack this one extremely specific feature you, and possibly only you, want. The fact that you can distill your options down that far, on something so commoditized is a testament to that diversity, not a lack of it.

C'mon Leslieann, that statement has no legs, and you're better than that. You can't in one breath say 'giant keyboard companies exclusively make full-size keyboards' and then in the next breath say 'if you you want a keyboard in the full-size space then you might just be the only individual on the planet who does'. The contradiction is preposterous. At the very least, I hope Dell, hp, Logitech et al all have bronze statues of me in their foyers, since I'm apparently one of the only people keeping their megalithic keyboard empires alive.

Let me rephrase my point. Usually, the mass market lies somewhere in the middle, while hobby spaces branch out in multiple, often opposite, directions from that middle. You yourself mentioned the perfect example yourself:

Small form factor computers where you can spend $250-$500 on a case the size of a toaster (often runs as hot as one as well).

Exactly. Enthusiasts spend crazy money on tiny computers. And as we're all aware, another group of enthusiasts spend crazy money on gigantic multi-GPU beasts. Layperson PCs lie somewhere in the middle - neither tiny, nor huge. All three market segments are valid. Compare this to keyboards, where layperson keyboards are near the large end of the spectrum, and the vast majority of enthusiasts and innovation lies only to one side of that spectrum.

[Leslieann]

The lack of diversity is only because among all these boards, they all lack this one extremely specific feature you, and possibly only you, want. The fact that you can distill your options down that far, on something so commoditized is a testament to that diversity, not a lack of it.

C'mon Leslieann, that statement has no legs, and you're better than that. You can't in one breath say 'giant keyboard companies exclusively make full-size keyboards' and then in the next breath say 'if you you want a keyboard in the full-size space then you might just be the only individual on the planet who does'. The contradiction is preposterous. At the very least, I hope Dell, hp, Logitech et al all have bronze statues of me in their foyers, since I'm apparently one of the only people keeping their megalithic keyboard empires alive.

Let me rephrase my point. Usually, the mass market lies somewhere in the middle, while hobby spaces branch out in multiple, often opposite, directions from that middle. You yourself mentioned the perfect example yourself:

Of course big business lies in the middle, it tries to satisfy everyone with a one size fits all approach.

What is offered up in the hobby segment is a reflection of the hobby itself, for a while TKL was pretty much the only thing people wanted, then it was 60% then 65% but there was always a small section of TKL and full size... There may not be any right now but there will likely be another soon, not everything is on offer all the time, you have to look at it over a period of time.

This whole hobby/market is us, it's created by, made by and fullfilled by us, it's not big business, if we can't find it, we make it. That's how almost all these boards got made. Why are there no full size offerings right now? No one has wanted it enough to put in that effort. Create an IC, see who is interested and come up with a plan. Stop waiting for others to do it for you if you want something specific, that's how it happens here.

[_rubik]

Vendors who keep products on their web site, but are constantly out of stock and no plans to restock.

I think it's part "I want to archive" and part "I want to bolster my clout". Time in the market and a successful string of GBs are the two things that separate reputable vendors from the up-starts; leaving "out of stock items" is one way of showing both.

- why do we have to mod everything? Why not sell actual ready product that has all what we do when modding our keyboards/switches? It all should be done during production, at least all those things that are a must, not preference.

We've spun our own narrative that "custom" > "prebuilt" and "limited supply" > "unlimited". I think that narrative is starting to change though as business adopt better layouts and quality materials. Razer (and company) leave a nasty stain on the hobby that I think companies like Glorious and Drop are slowly scrubbing away.

This whole hobby/market is us, it's created by, made by and fullfilled by us, it's not big business, if we can't find it, we make it. That's how almost all these boards got made. Why are there no full size offerings right now? No one has wanted it enough to put in that effort. Create an IC, see who is interested and come up with a plan. Stop waiting for others to do it for you if you want something specific, that's how it happens here.

I always wonder why "big business" is so disconnected from the trends we (as consumers) are driving. As I mentioned above, Logitech, Razer, Corsair etc just haven't adapted to the desires of the hobby/market. Glorious is profiting off the sloths.

I guess we're just at opposite ends of the keyboard market.

[Leslieann]

I always wonder why "big business" is so disconnected from the trends we (as consumers) are driving. As I mentioned above, Logitech, Razer, Corsair etc just haven't adapted to the desires of the hobby/market. Glorious is profiting off the sloths.

I guess we're just at opposite ends of the keyboard market.

Do you have any idea how much $$ the molds are to make a keyboard? Tens of thousands of dollars.
There's a reason companies like Ducky, Leopold and Cooler Master reuse the same molds over and over again, it's expensive and time consuming.

Sure each keyboard only costs $10 to produce (a high estimate including box and shipping) but they just spent $80k or more on tooling and R&D (probably a bit high but you need to make sure something will work before you buy thousands of them). They're going to be out 3/4mil before they even leave China, you still have payroll, marketing, etc... Assuming a profit margin of about $25 (not unreasonable) that means they need to sell 4000 of them to break even before they start a marketing campaign so they're going to order at least double that, let's make it a nice round 10,000 units. This means they're out of pocket $1.1 million before it even arrives at the dock which can easily be a year after you started on this.

So lets say they do make that perfect board for us, what happens if a trend changes 2 months after production has starter and suddenly no one wants that board? It's happened. One misstep and all that money is gone before your product even hits our shore. Ducky recently redid their lineup, what was the first thing noted? No hot swap. Hot swap was probably nothing when those boards were designed and orders placed and by the time they arrived everyone was talking Hot Swap*. Granted maybe they chose not to use it, maybe they didn't want the risk (they do have issues), that doesn't matter to you if you want hot swap.

This doesn't even scratch the surface, hobbyists here are extremely fickle about everything on their boards, we'll even turn our nose up to it simply for being too popular because it is good. These companies have better things to do than to waste money chasing your whims when there is an easy open market with general consumers. Sure they will come and try and taunt us into their products but they aren't going to cater to us. They don't want to sell us 500 keyboard then a refresh and another 500 next year they want to sell 10,000 keyboards this quarter and have another batch of 5k for each quarter thereafter.


*I'm not ragging on Ducky, like Logitech and Razer they aren't really after people who hand lube boutique switches and I'm not saying they chose wrong or that sales are slow, frankly I have no idea what their sales are like, I'm just using this as an example because it highlights how trends can change during production. Ducky does a pretty good job at what they do.

[HungerMechanic]

Funny you should say that.

I remember back in 2019 or so [maybe 2018], Ducky and a number of similar manufacturers created threads on R/MK asking people "What do you want to see in a Ducky keyboard." And the overwhelming answer to Ducky, by a far margin, was hotswap.

So they've had a year or two to implement user suggestions. Hope they made good use of it. I see Leopold is creating more case colours, such as a nice new gray + ripoff Oblivion Mono combo, and they are starting to use non-Cherry switches like SP Star. So they continue to learn.

[Findecanor]

It irks me that silent tactile switches are still not mainstream, (among mass-produced keyboards, not among customs)
The mainstream manufacturers are largely still making mechanical keyboards like they did in 2014.

[_rubik]

I always wonder why "big business" is so disconnected from the trends we (as consumers) are driving. As I mentioned above, Logitech, Razer, Corsair etc just haven't adapted to the desires of the hobby/market. Glorious is profiting off the sloths.

I guess we're just at opposite ends of the keyboard market.

Do you have any idea how much $$ the molds are to make a keyboard? Tens of thousands of dollars.
There's a reason companies like Ducky, Leopold and Cooler Master reuse the same molds over and over again, it's expensive and time consuming.

Oh I completely agree, but I see a middle ground. Without any sales numbers it's hard to actually know what their net profits are, but I would gamble that a solid 65% or WKL or <insert popular layout here> board would sell gangbusters in comparison to their full sized models.

All speculation of course, and your point is well taken.

It's just a pattern we've seen before with Cherry and the wave of clones. I'm excited to see mid-sized companies address the gap between mass-produced boards and trends set by the bespoke community.

[killyou]

My biggest gripe is that everything is about colorful GMK keycaps and all board designs are 65%. Other sizes are not getting enough attention. Don't get me started on floating key design either.

[rowdy]

Lack of proper drivers/configuration software with support and updates from the manufacturer.

Not some suspicious exe with poorly translated instructions that you download from Google Drive.

Mac software would be nice too.

[Leslieann]

Oh I completely agree, but I see a middle ground. Without any sales numbers it's hard to actually know what their net profits are, but I would gamble that a solid 65% or WKL or <insert popular layout here> board would sell gangbusters in comparison to their full sized models.

There has been smaller boards sold but again, think about who is buying from Best Buy, Office Depot, Staples and such, there is no way in hell Ducky even comes close to the numbers Logitech produces. Ever walk into an office and see something more exotic than Logitech? I think I saw a Cooler Master once. It's easier to count the number of offices that lack Dell or HP products than it is to count the number of offices I see that lack Logitech products.

I looked up the financials, they made $500mil in keyboard and keyboard/mouse combo sales in 2018 and again in 2019 and that is NET, not gross and this does not include mice sold individually (about the same amount!). Even if you assume $20 profit per board (remember this is net), that's a hell of a lot of keyboards and even if you break it up among 50 models you can bet they expect massive sales for each of them. If something only sold 10,000 that's a failed product for them.


65% will not sell to office users.
Winkeyless is NEVER going to happen. Logitech has to pay to display the "Certified Windows Compatible" sticker, it's part of their marketing and branding and Microsoft is certainly not going to let them advertise it without a Winkey.
Even TKL is a hard sell for Logitech because so much of their stuff is bought by parents and offices, they need or at least think they need the numpad. I've had a bunch of customers go up in laptop size specifically because they wanted a numpad after having one that did not.

[Leslieann]

Lack of proper drivers/configuration software with support and updates from the manufacturer.
Not some suspicious exe with poorly translated instructions that you download from Google Drive.
Mac software would be nice too.

This is because soooo many keyboards are white label stuff.

I can literally fire off an email and get 500 TKLs with rgb and my name on them for under $2k delivered in 30 days right to an Amazon warehouse and never leave my bed except to get my credit card.

[samsamm777]

My biggest gripe is uneccessary group buys. Brands do group buys to mitigate their investment into a product, which i feel is disingenious. I understand GBs build hype for a product, but there must be better ways which dont put the customers money at risk. I run a small keyboard brand and ive not done any GBs. I invested my own money into production, and we're building a customer base. I'd like to think this is a more honest way to run a business. Probably not a common opinion, but thats how i feel.

[Leopard223]

That we still have god awful stabilizers and instead of pushing vendors to make new stabilziers designs that doesn't require heavy and messy moddding we invent countless bizzare and messy methods to eliminate stab rattle. 
Just a rant after I thought I figured out how to tune my stabs and found them having just the slightest annoying ticking.

[HungerMechanic]

Yes, there is so little innovation in the 'basics' [stabilizers, fundamentally new switch designs, keycap materials] and so much in keycap colourways, artisans, themed cables, switch recolours.

Is supply driving these purchases, or is this where most demand is?

[timw4mail]

The really cheap boards have ugly keycaptions and gaudy leds.

[Linkblade]

The english ANSI keyboard layout is dominating this niche market. Since the european ISO keyboard layouts have less buyers this makes ISO layouts niche in an already niche market, so very hard or limited to get. Well, that's how things work, but I would still like to have more choice for ISO layout boards and keycaps.

That said and off-topic, because it's not keyboard industry, I hate it when game developers put controls to something like arrow keys+Z+X and make them not rebindable. Z for me in a german layout is swapped with the Y position, so I have to awkwardly press those buttons. Z is swapped in other countries' layouts too. Game developers would just need to use X+C, because those are the same, then everything would be just fine for everyone!

[jamster]

Yes, there is so little innovation in the 'basics' [stabilizers, fundamentally new switch designs, keycap materials] and so much in keycap colourways, artisans, themed cables, switch recolours.

Is supply driving these purchases, or is this where most demand is?

It's almost certainly demand. Just look at all the hype around the ICs with gushing enthusiasm about tiny cosmetic variants on old designs.

Or take the most casual of glances at r/mk.

[tiltowait]

I sometimes feel like I'm on crazy pills looking at r/mk.

[Madrobby]

1. Lack of cases with proper bezels (so I don't need a wristrest).
2. Lack of cases and PCBs for 100% builds

[_rubik]

1. Lack of cases with proper bezels (so I don't need a wristrest).
2. Lack of cases and PCBs for 100% builds

"proper" is an interesting word to use. I could make the argument that wrist wrests give people more flexibility

That said, I'm surprised the tex shinobi isn't more popular