I need to be clearer, it isn't "too much" for a keyboard, the question I have is if it is sustainable. Or put another way will the keyboard.io folks ever get the chance to make a 'model 2.0' ?
This is my reasoning on that. As a bespoke item it carries a premium price for folks who value its design points.
A short anecdote; I have a pair of Roger Sound Labs studio monitor speakers that I love, probably paid twice what similar high end studio speakers cost but the folks at RSL were passionate about speakers and made the kinds of quality choices I would make when building speakers myself. That quality is evident in that here it is 30 years later and the speakers still sound great and still as they did when I bought them. Sadly, RSL no longer exists.
I think about that and similar vendors where I have gone out of my way to pay a premium to get a product that isn't working so hard for profit margin that it has compromised the durability or quality of the product. Those vendors are fragile.
If they make a really high quality product with the best components and engineering margins to insure decades of service, you only buy one unit and your done. Others will buy the same unit, but once the market is saturated you are stuck, you aren't selling any more, you still have bills and staff to pay. You need to either move on to a different thing, or shrink dramatically in size to be the maintenance organization.
A Bosch engineer was talking to me about predicting whether or not a particular spare part would be available 100 years from now. For things like machine tools, there are lots of them that have been in service for 100+ years. However, if you collect old computers, you know just how hard it can be to find parts to repair an S-100 machine like an Altair or IMSAI, or Apple II or PET parts. Forget finding a new set of DTL transistors for a PDP-1. Even the Alto project that kens and company are working on, that machine is 20 years old and you can't buy new disc packs for it or r/w heads for the drive. (both considered 'consumable' parts by the Alto)
So at the end of the day, can a company like keyboard.io survive by "only" charging $330 for a keyboard that they have nominally already sold to 2,000 backers. What is the total addressable market for that keyboard? 5,000? 10,000? And it serves a market (desktop computers) which is in steep double digit declines.
Even with big budgets such niche products find themselves lost (I've got a Microsoft 'commander' here you can play with :-))
My thinking then on this artisanal keyboard is whether or not they made the right choice by going to China. It seems like something you will sell a few thousand of, tops, and if you can make/keep all of the tooling in house you can control your supply chain fully.
Anyway, while I can't go that high for a keyboard, I know folks who will. I won't be surprised to find out they are already backers of this project. But from a long term "these guys will be impacting the way we think about keyboards for the next 30 years" I don't think they have set themselves up for even a shot at that. For that, it would have to sell for $1,000 each. That would give them the extra runway to develop additional fabrication capabilities in house and push the envelope on all sides.
So you think if I use a shitty keyboard for a long time, that would justify paying more money for it in the first place? Sounds almost like a sunken cost fallacy to me. You should not feel obligated to continue using something because you regret paying so much for it. Had I paid too much for my keyboard, I would not attempt to comfort myself by using it more. Similarly, I would not find comfort in looking back at how much I used it.
The intrinsic values that the keyboard itself has should set its worth, not the value you extracted from it in the past. It is a keyboard, not an heirloom.
I've pretty much exclusively used mechanical keyboards my entire life. A brief stint where I wasn't using them lead to me having RSI, and I've since switched back and importantly switched to an ergonomic keyboard design. I don't think the comparison to audiophiles is apt (although I'm one of those too, of sorts), because a keyboard is the primary and most critical input device for both work and play when you have your life devoted to computing. I spend 10-12 hours on a computer nearly every single day, the ROI for splashing out $700 for a custom ergonomic mechanical keyboard is immensely better than spending that money doing anything else.
In pure EV/economic sense, spending big on a mechanical keyboard is a fantastic decision if you work/live on a computer.
I totally agree, but it's not all black and white.
You can still have nice things N% of the time, and just fallback to the regular stuff when away from your desk.
Also the keyboard community isn't always rational or focused on ROI. It's both parts ergonomics (preventing health issues) and optimizing for productivity and nice working conditions (regardless of cost).
Even if you hold that theory, there's an implicit limit as t->infinity. Certainly if a new keyboard that's objectively better was introduced today, by tomorrow it wouldn't have >50% marketshare.
People will gladly spend hundreds of dollars on "fancy plates" (aka china) that sit on display in shelves. Thousands or tens of thousands of dollars could be paid for paint on canvas, just because the paint arrangement is unique, or the person that did the painting is well known. People pay 5 dollars for a cup of coffee at starbucks.
I think it's just important to realize that spending isn't always a strictly rational process. That said, there are definitely significant pieces of engineering that go into a keyboard. Here, the keyboard is fully programmable and you can flash the firmware. For some people's workflows, this might be very important. No keyboard in your price range will allow that. This keyboard is equipped with a low-power ARM cortex, which means it can handle additional logic a typical keyboard can't. You can use "layers" and swap between them at a hardware instead of a software level. This means you can take your keybindings with you as opposed to needing to change the OS settings when you switch computers while using the same keyboard. If you have actual wrist issues due to an injury, frankly I would pay even more money than this to ensure that I can type pain-free or that the symptoms don't deteriorate. As someone that's worked in hardware, I can say first-hand that the plastic injection molds are extremely expensive for products not sold at a massive scale.
I could go on. I'm not a "keyboard collector" or anything, but I do have a keyboard that cost me over 100 dollars, and having used it for eight years now, I consider the price entirely reasonable given the utility its afforded me, and the longevity. Not to mention that I can replace keycaps if needed, I can replace the cord, I can reprogram it as my needs change, etc.
I can understand if English isn't your first language, that's not a problem. Tone-wise, I think if you genuinely are curious about something, just make that clear. Otherwise, the question comes off as a rhetorical one, where you're "asking" in the sense of "why anyone would be so stupid as to spend this much money is beyond me."
Yeah, I don't quite understand this attitude. If you use a computer as much as I do, you deserve to have a nice keyboard. Maybe not $2000 USD nice, but still decent.
I had gotten nearly two decades of use from the three of my Microsoft Natural keyboards (the original one). They weren't that expensive at the time.
I'm currently running a pair of MS Natural 4000s (one bought used from eBay) that are each approximately a decade old. I had to take them apart once to clean the key membrane, but they've been fine since. (Just looking at one of them now in front of me... it could really use a good vacuuming.)
Don't get me wrong, custom keyboards are great and it's good to see innovation, but some builds aren't that reasonable in terms of investment for an input device.
The biases in your reasoning lies in the fact that you are assuming I am considering "Das Keyboard" and the likes to be reasonably priced. I am not. Don't try to justify an overpriced item by showing me another overpriced item in the same category.
I'm not saying it's not marginal, but if you spend time around audiophiles, they make lots of claims that aren't just "marginal" but simply not based in reality. I would not spend $2000 on a keyboard, but I believe people who do are doing it largely based on aesthetics, not the kind of imaginary science that audiophiles do.
How so? The money spent on the keyboards isn't destroyed. It goes to the manufacturer who presumably spends it on housing and food and medicine and stuff.
I expect the keyboards price is high and its build quality low so it will hopefully break within 2 years. Mechanical switches and durability will very unlikely fit in their business model for this product. The target is $$$ and not a great and lasting product for the consumer (as usual...).
"Too expensive" is a perfectly fine thing to think about a product like that, and is very far away from thinking nobody wants it.
Qwerty keyboards were always a niche, and "nice, but I don't need one" is reasonably classified as an underestimate of the product but it's still approval.
Sorry I wasn't clear, I meant that keyboards are a commodity. They're mass produced low margin items and there's little differentiation for the most part. There's rarely a compelling event that causes someone to replace their existing keyboard. The industry always wants more profits and better margins so creating the perception of mechanical being better and therefore more expensive allows them to extract more money from an already mature market through the illusion of superiority. I do find the whole thing annoying but I suppose it's good for the economy, so more power to anyone that cares for them.
I got a bit triggered by that "sub-$1k keyboard" of yours. I mean, you are totally right, this is a typical product for that price, i.e. this is a "normal" market price for this kind of product… But, man, I just can't get over the fact how ridiculously overpriced these things are! These are such simple devices, so much easier to produce than "classical" music instruments. Yet because of small market and the product being somewhat of a "professional tool" we still get these pretty basic keyboards for $1k+ and behave as if it's a totally fair price because of hammer action and stuff (and take it for granted that $500 devices should have shitty keyboards).
Sure, good mechanics are worth something, but (especially when talking about midi-keyboards) it's the only thing that's complicated in these devices, and it isn't that expensive to produce.
Keyboards that cost over $100 tend to be much, much nicer, and are more easily tailored to an individual's taste.
Around $200 and above, most are machined from aluminum, and require the user to supply their own switches and keycaps. My daily driver, whose USB connector seems to be reaching EOL, is a heavy-ass chunk of bright blue Alu, makes noise like a machine gun when I need to correct someone on the internet, and has limited edition keycaps in a fun (imo) purple-and-cyan color scheme. Total cost of this thing was probably $250~$300, but I'm happy.
I have over $1k worth of keyboards and related hardware strewn about my apartment, and the only reason I've considered selling some of my collection is to buy fancier pieces. To each their own.
Like beds, people aren't usually willing to spend lots of money on a good keyboard. It's unfortunate, especially considering how much time you spend typing on one. But the moment you start talking mechanical switches, your keyboard is going to be above the hundred dollar mark (knock-offs notwithstanding). Split the keyboard, another two hundred dollars. Throw in something like Soli, and you're looking at a thousand dollar keyboard.
How many people would be willing to pay over a thousand dollars for a good keyboard?
This is my reasoning on that. As a bespoke item it carries a premium price for folks who value its design points.
A short anecdote; I have a pair of Roger Sound Labs studio monitor speakers that I love, probably paid twice what similar high end studio speakers cost but the folks at RSL were passionate about speakers and made the kinds of quality choices I would make when building speakers myself. That quality is evident in that here it is 30 years later and the speakers still sound great and still as they did when I bought them. Sadly, RSL no longer exists.
I think about that and similar vendors where I have gone out of my way to pay a premium to get a product that isn't working so hard for profit margin that it has compromised the durability or quality of the product. Those vendors are fragile.
If they make a really high quality product with the best components and engineering margins to insure decades of service, you only buy one unit and your done. Others will buy the same unit, but once the market is saturated you are stuck, you aren't selling any more, you still have bills and staff to pay. You need to either move on to a different thing, or shrink dramatically in size to be the maintenance organization.
A Bosch engineer was talking to me about predicting whether or not a particular spare part would be available 100 years from now. For things like machine tools, there are lots of them that have been in service for 100+ years. However, if you collect old computers, you know just how hard it can be to find parts to repair an S-100 machine like an Altair or IMSAI, or Apple II or PET parts. Forget finding a new set of DTL transistors for a PDP-1. Even the Alto project that kens and company are working on, that machine is 20 years old and you can't buy new disc packs for it or r/w heads for the drive. (both considered 'consumable' parts by the Alto)
So at the end of the day, can a company like keyboard.io survive by "only" charging $330 for a keyboard that they have nominally already sold to 2,000 backers. What is the total addressable market for that keyboard? 5,000? 10,000? And it serves a market (desktop computers) which is in steep double digit declines.
Even with big budgets such niche products find themselves lost (I've got a Microsoft 'commander' here you can play with :-))
My thinking then on this artisanal keyboard is whether or not they made the right choice by going to China. It seems like something you will sell a few thousand of, tops, and if you can make/keep all of the tooling in house you can control your supply chain fully.
Anyway, while I can't go that high for a keyboard, I know folks who will. I won't be surprised to find out they are already backers of this project. But from a long term "these guys will be impacting the way we think about keyboards for the next 30 years" I don't think they have set themselves up for even a shot at that. For that, it would have to sell for $1,000 each. That would give them the extra runway to develop additional fabrication capabilities in house and push the envelope on all sides.
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