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geekhack Community => Keyboards => Topic started by: 8_INCH_FLOPPY on Tue, 14 September 2010, 21:17:10
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Title sums it up. How many, what brand/model/switch-type and how long did it take.
It seems that keyboard quality for most brands is decreasing every year. My local library had the same set of Keytronic membrane keyboards for at least 10 years. Last year they got rid of all of them except for 2 and replaced them with these horrible Logitec keyboards. When they got them, they sucked, and now, after a year of use, they are practically unusable. The ancient Keytronics show less wear and are much more comfortable to type on than the new Logitecs. Those things wear so easily that all of the vowel keys will activate if you breath on them. A couple of weeks ago, they replaced some of the really worn Logitecs with new Logitecs which already have very shiny keys and suck even more than the old ones. Hopefully, there will be a counter movement in the computer industry as people realize the importance of good quality keyboards.
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I suppose I should give my own example. I've only really worn out 1 board. It was a pretty hefty old membrane keytronic from the early 90's. I've almost killed the dell that came with my last computer, but it's not quite there yet. My mechanicals don't show any wear at all, but that's because I cycle through them.
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I type A LOT and would usually burn through a rubber dome Dell, HP or whatever OEM keyboards we would have at various jobs in 1-3 months. (They really started to feel crappy to me and my speed would decrease and typos would begin to increase) Logitech/Microsoft aftermarket keyboards lasted a few months up to a year. I've yet to wear out a mechanical board but I've made lots of keys shine. I did feel a difference in a Topre variable after a few weeks. The keys began to feel more rattly but it was very tolerable and not a big deal. I have worn letters off of lasered caps and one board that I used for 2 years got fingernail gouges you commonly see on keys like M, N and others. (You don't need long fingernails to do it)
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I've "worn out" a couple: an old logitech board, and my Saitek Eclipse II. I play a lot of first person shooters, so the WASD cluster and left shift keys wear out quickly. First the lettering completely wears off, then the feel of the rubber domes goes to hell. They're still functional, but have lost most of their tactility, and so are awful to type on.
The Saitek wore out in about 2 years of use. The logitech lasted through 5 years of college before I finally ditched it. For comparison, my parent's computer has a Microsoft Natural from the 90's is still going strong - and they type much more than I do. That limited dataset would seem to indicate that quality has indeed declined. I actually found this site because I was so pissed off at how mushy the A and D buttons on my Saitek had become. I figured there had to be better keyboards out there, and I was right.
(typed on my Model F AT, still going strong after 25 years)
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I honestly don't remember how many keyboards I had or how fast I wore them out, before my first rubber roll up. I'm going to take a guess that I wore out about three rubber domes in about 3-5 years each. I wore out my first silicone Grandtec Virtually Indestructible keyboard in about 3 years. I wore out the glowtype version in one year.
I wore out a Dell D620 keyboard in about 3 years.
I have to give my rubber dome compaq some respect, because aside from a lil dust it seems pretty much the same as the day I bought it. Then again it has only received about a year of abuse.
Honestly, I'm pretty good to my keyboards, so even crap ones tend to last at least a year.
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Before I switched to mechanicals I wore out several logitechs, one of those old ibm membranes, and a hhkb lite 2. Haven't had any problems with my siigs that I use the most now, and if i did I'd just re switch them.
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I only wore out two Cherry G83 rubber domes at home. I have a feeling that the rubber sheets deteriorate with time whether you use them or not. At work I wore out one rubber dome which was replaced with an even worse Logitec rubber dome. I couldn't take it anymore so I replaced it with my own Cherry MX-Blue. I'm a happy man now.
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Aren't keyboards like ball-point pens? They become boring before they stop working :)
Having said that, I've completely worn out the keys off a Dell Inspiron a few years ago and hammered the space-bar of my MS Natural Ergo 4000 to uselessness recently. The keys on the Dell Latitude laptop are looking a bit dodgy at the moment, hence my recent arrival onto geekhack.org.
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I've never worn out a keyboard. I've worn off a few key legends, some keyboards have spontaneously failed, and I've spilt coffee in one. But I don't count those as wearing out. To me wearing out implies the device performed well, within the design parameters. If they fail prematurely, that isn't wearing out, it's a faulty item or crap design.
I've worn out one mouse - after about 3 years of heavy use the scroll wheel became unreliable (notches became out of sync with the activation points so I had to keep opening it up to keep the slotted wheel spotlessly clean.)
Domestic washing machines are a good thing to compare to. All their parts are designed very carefully so that they wear out around the same time, making them disposable products (if one part fails, the chances are that other parts are also close to breaking too, so the machine is beyond economic repair.) So they are short-lived compared to laundromat machines, but their cheapness makes up for it. It's a perfect balance (albeit a consumerism focused balance.)
The problem with today's mainstream keyboards is they are not built that way. Everything is about making them as cheap as possible while maintaining initial basic functionality. No consideration is given to making parts wear at an even rate. The switch action degrades rapidly both in terms of feel and reliability. Nothing else really wears other than the legends. It's just the important part that goes bad! It's like the complete opposite design philosophy to the smart way they build washing machines.
Tl;dr: Today's mainstream keyboards are badly designed.
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Same, never wore out a keyboard. One or two keys with bad contact resulting in multiple or no events - yes. Worn out legends - yes. But nothing beyond this.
________
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I would not consider it an improvement if the keyboard still stopped being useful in 1-3 years, but instead of just some keys no longer actuating and key legends being worn off, the case & keys had holes and cracks. That's like saying, well the internals are ****, so let's make the case and keys out of that biodegradable corn stuff, because the whole thing won't be usable in a year, anyways. Besides hard drives are similar. When a hard drive starts to go, you still have a lot of metal, etc. that hasn't worn at all. As long as the materials are being recycled, rather than sitting in a dump not degrading, it is ok.
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Well, I went through a few Focus boards before switching to buckling springs, but they were very old and near dead anyway.
Rubber-domes tended to die in 6 months due to my pounding.
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Actually, one of the seams on one of my silicone boards had actually started to separate. I patched it with some glue. So I have had one case of the case going before the board. In fact that board is the board in my sig, which is still fully functional, sitting rolled up and ready to travel. Feels wrong calling those things a board. Maybe they should be referred to as silicone key mat.
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Title sums it up. How many, what brand/model/switch-type and how long did it take.
Razer Tarantula(Rubber dome): 6 months before keys stopped registering regularly. Looked at the internals and it's some sort of SK-xxxx board.
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i must replace a rubber dome after a year, otherwise it becomes like poo in a microwave. The tactility is not very pleasant but it still smells fine.
I is using my first mechanical board so I hope this one will last the longing time!
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I don't think I've yet worn out a keyboard... though the IBM M15 at work is feeling pretty "dull" these days, and the right-side right-arrow key started doubling recently. I hope PCKeyboard.com still does refurb work.
Before the M15s, I had a 1992ish rubber dome and the spacebar was getting squishy, but it probably had a lot of life left in it. I kept it as a server keyboard for a long time because I'd painted it with a neat stone effect.
My 286 nee XT's Chicony keyboard had some kind of Cherryish switches, I think. It had all the verve banged out of it but it never actually failed. I ditched it because it took up too much space.
And I did bang the hell out of my first keyboard, a Sanyo MB-555. It had lost its crispness but still functioned when it got tossed.