Hey there, hi and hello~ can I make you some chamomile tea? Didn't notice you.
Mmmm, tea, yes please. And scones. *monocle*
I know I can reach Thermaltake as I review for them. Vortex has never responded to myself or other members of RWLabs. It seems like they make products for other companies to support, and to get recognized you need to be one of their vendors.
Same here, well, at least could - don't know who's running things post-Weller. (Talk about one of those emails that makes you sadface.) I've completely given up on reaching Vortex for any sort of review sample, forget presales. Yes,
presales. And KBTalking's proven equally worthless - supposedly they make it yet they know nothing about it? Uh. Yeah. Something ain't right there.
This isn't the first time you've run into that sort of stonewall? I get it all the time from companies expressing my need to deal with the store at which the product was purchased. Their operations just simply do not exist outside of the warehouse/factory.
No stonewalling; I've had VERY long delays with Thermaltake going through retail though. Never had an actual stonewall though. SteelSeries, even through retail, has always taken care of me. (I pretty much insist on not abusing back channels for support except during reviews. Just ask engineering.)
Reason I brought up Thermaltake is because they do have a support organization that doesn't exist purely to go "blah blah return to point of sale." But a lot of these supposed "high end" manufacturers? Don't. They have zero support. And they expect me to pay a super-premium price, for a sub-par product, with a ridiculous amount of markup, and they won't even stand behind it.
And I'm beyond tired of the claims of keycaps costing $X. Again,
Unicomp sells a complete set of high quality dye-sublimation PBT keycaps for $25. That is the economies of scale. Do you know what the junk ABS keycaps Ducky switched to cost them? Probably less than $10 for the set.
Quality keycaps do not cost manufacturers $60, period. If they did, keyboards would cost far, far more. Small order quantities like group buys cost more, because they aren't making thousands and thousands of them and there is no steady stream of future orders for the parts. (More group buys != future orders.)
So when a manufacturer like Filco cranks out say, 50,000 keyboards all using the same keycap set, it does not bloody well cost them $60 for those keycaps. It costs them $10. For the SET. Colors? Do not cost $5 a keycap. They want to sell you the cheapest crap they can source at the super-premium price, then you say 'oh well it was me' and instead of recognizing a low quality product, go spend money you shouldn't have to for one of mediocre quality.
It is the penultimate example of throwing good money after bad hardware. You buy a junk keyboard at a showoff price - let's say a Filco at $150 with ABS keys. You show it off for two weeks and then it looks like ass because ABS pad printed junk. So you 'fix' that by spending $65 for keycaps which are not total failure. Only to find out that THEY fail in 6 months. So you buy another $75 set of keycaps promising they'll be better. And they're not.
So you're now out $290 + $50 S&H = $340 for a $150 keyboard. That still doesn't look or work as advertised. You bought a keyboard so bad that you had to buy a second keyboard to replace it.
This is not 'modding' this is not 'the keyboard way' this is not 'zen.' This is unrestrained stupidity. And instead of fighting manufacturers cranking out this swill, you make excuses, say how it could be worse, and insult posters for making the reasonable statement that a super-premium mechanical keyboad hewn by the hands of god should not have such glaring and repeated and well known defects, and a record of refusing to acknowledge them or blame them on others.
Razer Syndrome.
