0 voters
I know that all of these make up a keyboard and it is important for all of them to be of good quality. But if you were only given a single choice of having it made high quality suited/tailored to your liking to determine the most important factor in liking a keyboard, which would it be?
I interpreted the question as like “if you were stuck with some stock mass market board, what change would make the biggest improvement” or something like that.
For me, that would absolutely be the PCB/Plate (but really the PCB if I had to pick one. I can handle some meh switches. From a mass-market board I’d go for blues or blacks, neither of which I particularly like, but I can tolerate them. Some super flexy glossy ugly plastic case sucks, but it could be a lot worse. OEM keycaps aren’t great, especially the shine through ones, but I can use them. What I can’t handle is not having proper programmability. It is absolutely a deal breaker for me now.
Preach!
Although to me, switches are still the most important part of the board; I find myself spending the most time with my not-so-programmable Model M (okay, it’s running a firmware I wrote, but it can’t do anything cool like QMK).
I couldn’t do without the programmability of QMK or KLL so the PCB would be highest followed closely by switches and stabs.
The PCB — it’s the heart of the keyboard; if it’s low quality and for one reason or another fails, how good the rest is becomes irrelevant.