Have you ever been a victim of niche community's hyperbolic claims? You're told that something is "night and day" different or better than something else--that it's a "totally different animal," so you spend the money on the expensive thing only to receive it and then after typing on it briefly, start yelling "mother@#cker!"
As an example, I'm part of the pro audio and audiophile/head-fi community, and there are a lot of people in those communities who like to claim that one DAC (Digital to Analog Converter) sounds "night and day different" to another DAC. If that were really true, then something is really, really wrong with one of the DAC, because the whole purpose of a DAC is to convert digital data to analog signal that we can hear, and it's supposed to be as transparent as possible. If two DAC's sound "night and day" different from each other, then that means one of them would have to sound like complete trash, and no DAC on the market can possibly sound like complete trash since it wouldn't even have made it out of the proof-of-concept phase, let alone be allowed into production.
So essentially, such hyperbole is just ludicrous exaggerations of a niche community's tendency to lose objectivity and focus far too much on minutia that in reality, is just a bunch of hair-splitting. When only a dog can reliably hear those differences and a human being would have to do one double-blind A/B testing after another to even assess the differences, it is NOT "night and day." To claim that any detectable difference is "night and day" is just a gross misrepresentation and all it does is take away the descriptive power of "night and day" (or "a complete different animal," or "nothing alike at all").
The keyboard community is not immune to this. No niche community is, because it is in the nature of niche communities to put everything under the microscope and blow them way out of proportion. WAAAAYYYY out of proportion. Like, off the f-cking charts.
Case in point: People claiming that 55g Topre is a "totally different experience" from 45g, and the two are "nothing alike at all," are committing the same sin of using ludicrous hyperbole that ends up misleading others into murder, bank robbery, armed security truck heists, selling drugs, and prostitution--just so they can make enough money and buy expensive keyboards like the 55g RealForce 87U. (See what I did there? Hyperbole, mother@$cker.)
Well, after doing all that, I was finally able to afford a 55g RealForce 87U, and it arrived yesterday morning.
After exercising all the restraint I had honed over half a lifetime (the first half was spent being as clueless as any young idiot), I was able to not just tear the packaging into shreds while foaming at the mouth. I unwrapped the keyboard, gave it some gentle caresses while cooing to it with some baby-talk. Then I pushed its hard plug deep into my computer's tight USB port. And then I let my fingers fly.
GODDAMMIT!
No!!!
It is NOT "night and day" different from the 45g Leopold FC660C I have, nor is it "nothing like" the ergonomically weighted version of 87U.
I had just become a victim of "myopic niche community's ludicrous hyperbole syndrome."
Yes, there are of course differences, but the differences are NOT profound. The increase in tactility/resistance force is not something you'll even notice that much if you're just typing normally and thinking about what you're writing, as opposed to purposely focusing on the feel of the keys instead of actually giving a $hit about what you're writing. The differences are not nearly as dramatic as say, going from a cheap $20 rubber dome keyboard to a buckling spring, or going from red Cherry MX to a blue or green. Yet the way people go on and on about the 55g Topre makes it sound like it's not even in the same species of animal as 45g, and that is simply not true.
Anyone else who's not in the niche community of mechanical keyboards would jump between the three Topre keyboards and probably not even notice much of a difference, except that the ergonomically weighted version feels softer and is a bit quieter. Very few people would even notice the difference between the 45g and the 55g. If the unsuspecting person is told that the 45g and 55g are supposed to feel "nothing alike" or "night and day different" or the 55g is a "totally different beast," and that person happens to be someone who is very impatient with ludicrous hyperbole, he'll likely slap whoever's telling him the BS silly. "Night and day different my ass," is what he would say. And then he would punch the person saying that crap repeatedly in the face, until that face is no more.
This is just like the way people use the word "awesome" for everything, to the point that the word completely loses its actual meaning. If someone asks you how you've been and you say "awesome," then holy $hit, you better elaborate because being "awesome" is not something we come across often in our lives. Tell us how exactly have you been "awesome." Did you win the lottery? Have you met the love of your life? Were you offered a tour of the cosmos by highly intelligent extraterrestrials? If so, did they divulge the date they'll be wiping the human race off the face of planet earth, because we're such giant A-holes to other animals and Mother Nature?
Anyway.
To those of you who have used ludicrous hyperbole in the past when describing keyboards (or anything else), please stop. It misleads people into spending a lot of money on stuff that makes very little objective differences in the grand scheme of things. Learn to use more scientifically objective descriptions instead. For example, X feels 20% more tactile than Y, or X is 30% louder than Y in the higher frequencies only, or X is slightly more orange in hue than Y--by about 10%. Don't use adjectives and descriptions that have no real meaning and cannot be quantified with the concept of measurement.
If we all agree to stop using ludicrous hyperbole, we just might stand a chance as a species. I know because the aliens told me. They can't stand that $hit either and they said if we stop doing it, they'll reconsider the plan to wipe Homo sapiens off the face of earth.
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