It's 2019 baby the hobbies evolved. More people have boards without numpads than do now, by a significant enough margin that catering to those people is at least a consideration. Yeah it sucks if you're a numpad user you gotta pay more but it's not any more noble of a payment than people right now who buy GMK base kits and never use their current numpads. There's nothing backwards about it at all.
as expected ace is wrong yet again
He or she was right though. How many full-sized custom kits are currently under active ICs or GBs right now? Most recently, I can only recall the Elephant. Maybe the various 1800 kits count too?
Realforce released an R2, and the first few questions were “Yes yes cool but TKL when?”.
The truth is, I find it very surprising that 100% boards are so loved, considering:
- Most people these days buy laptops with compact keyboards, not desktops. Hell, most people buy smartphones and their only computers are company-issued.
- Most people are not accountants or programmers.
- The one distinction of this hobby has always been weird tiny keyboards.
Of course it’s PERFECTLY fine if you’re into full-sized keyboards, but surely you can see that you’re part of a minority.
Honestly, the way I see it, we’ve been doing base kits with numpads for a long time now. We recently have one data point - thanks, GMK Jamón - that base kits with no numpad can still do well. Why not experiment with this idea some more? The more data points we have, the better decisions we can make.k