Good for them. Now… can they make a board with good stabilizers that doesn’t sound like crap? If so, they have Dorp beaten!
If you read this thread, they accept Durock and Zeal stabs as well. https://www.reddit.com/r/MechanicalKeyboards/comments/jo87l6/hey_rmk_founder_of_glorious_here_we_are_excited/
While I’m not personally a fan of the form-factor, I’m super-impressed with what they’ve got going on with this board.
- Gasket mount
- Milled ALU case
- PCB mount stabs
- 5-pin support
- South-facing LEDs
- Rotary encoder
- USBC
They’ve been listening, and it shows. I’m hoping they try their hand at a 65% with this kind of build style (maybe without the encoder and separated clusters) - I might not be able to resist that.
Yup, this might be the playbook moving forward;
- What’s a popular keyboard that’s demonstrated community longevity?
- How do we reproduce it cheaper and in higher quantities?
- How can we ensure community acceptance?
Seems like they ticked all the boxes here. Leveraging CK’s backlash was the beachhead they needed to roll this out.
Rotary Encoder…
Why… just why… -_-
It’s a double whammy of looking bad and having no practical use!
at least you’re very transparent about your bias =D
One thing a few people start discussing (rather aggressively after that one poster brings up Econ 101, lol) was that most of these makers are hobbyists that are not making much money off these customs because they’re doing it for the good of the community. Someone even says that upas barely makes anything off of boards like S75, and even lost money on one run.
I’m curious what others think of this? I don’t think any of these guys are going out and buying themselves a Ferrari after the fiscal year, but I’m not sure the margins are that slim.
I know someone’s costs for the cases he buys for his hifi amps (retail $5000-6000 depending on options) and the quality control on these has to be just as high as mech keyboards. The reason is any minor nick or scratch automatically drops the grading down from 9/10 to 7 or 8/10 per the popular grading standard used on the largest audio gear second hand website which can impact resale quite a bit. So no one accepts anything less than 9/10 (10/10 only if it is still sealed in box).
I don’t know about those particular hobbyists, but I do have some experience with manufacturing relatively small numbers of electronic devices (1000-ish), and my conclusion is that people greatly underestimate how much more work and cost there is to it above just the cost of making a single unit by hand. The setup costs, the provisioning, the programming, the testing, the packaging, the documentation, the certification, the storage, the deals with distributors, the shipping, the support, the handling of returns, the customs, etc., etc. — it all adds up bit by bit, until you easily end up with the final price around 3-4x of the original prototype, despite still doing most of the work yourself for free.