3 ms·

I remember over 20y ago, a filco was the best mechanical keyboard money could buy. I bought one a couple of years ago, to my surprise it was nearly identical.

by hirako2000 6mo ago

I remember over 20y ago, a filco was the best mechanical keyboard money could buy. I bought one a couple of years ago, to my surprise it was nearly identical. A bit cheaper material. Still over a 100 USD. The difference is one can by an Aula for less than half the price, with better 3 Bluetooth settings + 2.4 dongle, blacklit, better sound coming out of the keys, less loud and annoying. A great company that made the mistake to stay stagnant.

cosmic_cheese 6mo ago
The botique keyboard space exploded during that time, especially towards the latter half of the 10's and through the pandemic years. There were countless one-off group buys across the price spectrum all offering more interesting products, and in the last 5 years or so there's been a number of vendors offering enthusiast-level features in mass production boards (e.g. Keychron). It's definitely not a market where one can stand still.
- shrx 6mo ago
  I bought a ~60€ Redragon linear switches keyboard for my office desk to replace the company-provided shitty Logitech, not expecting much, and was very surprised by the quality. So competition is definitely tough.
- Blackthorn 6mo ago
  We've lost some classic names in keyboards. It's not mechanical but Keytronic made amazing rubber dome keyboards, and they left the business. I don't know what I'm going to do if I ever need to replace my current one.
- logicallee 6mo ago
  and they all suck. I bought the most silent and lowest-weight keys I could, and typing on it takes a ton of force and is very loud. Typing should be almost no force whatsoever and should not produce any sound at all, just the slightest bump you could imagine. Instead, it's loud enough to disturb whoever I'm with, while feeling like I'm not only getting my thoughts out but kneading dough at 100 WPM. It's nicer to type with just my thumbs on a tiny phone's glass virtual keyboard, as I'm doing now. true, at zero mm of key travel it's not ideal, but at least I'm not kneading dough while I do it.
  - dmos62 6mo ago
    Have you considered kneading some dough for strength training?
  - andrewf 6mo ago
    Some keyboard enthusiasts obtain lighter keypresses by adding weight to the underside of the keys.
- hirako2000 6mo ago
  In another universe, I can see Filco ergonomic keyboards. LED glass-screen keys that actually made sense on the very high end. Hot swaps. An enterprise line up with partnership with Dell and other big manufacturers, an affordable 3y lifespan silent mechanical keyboard would have pleased big tech workers. They had the talent and cash flow to make it happen and take the lead with economies of scale. Nothing wrong with sticking to what works, but the way to beat pale competition is to innovate.
jbm 6mo ago
I still have 4 of these, even one of their bluetooth ones. They all work, except a 15 year old one whose USB cable got frayed and fell apart. (I bought a USB-C port to see if I could fix it, yet another incomplete project) I agree with op who said that they aren't getting better but calling it stagnant is more than I would say. The build quality was quite high and they clearly focused on that, and the price reflected that. I own another mechanical keyboard that I bought from Amazon during the pandemic and I already started getting ghost tapping (I only used it for dev work so I was more than a little annoyed to see it). Not saying it is perfect though. They clearly were a Windows-first shop and that never changed. I've never managed to get the 変換 key and the other Kanji keys working in Linux or on Mac, much to my annoyance.
- cosmic_cheese 6mo ago
  Often behavior like ghost-tapping, double-inputs, etc aren't actually an issue with the board, but rather with the switches. A lot of newer boards come with hotswappable switches which makes it easy to fix this without soldering. Problems with the circuit board or the firmware it runs are certainly possible of course, but what I've seen most of are switch issues.
ginko 6mo ago
Pretty much this. I used a majestouch for ages. A good decade later I got a Ducky One 2 for work and the difference in quality and features is huge. I ended up replacing the Majestouch not too long after.
parl_match 6mo ago
> A great company that made the mistake to stay stagnant. Sometimes, a company like this is very few people who made something that they wanted and were happy to find others wanted it as well. So you call it a mistake, but it may very well have been intentional.
- hirako2000 6mo ago
  I think intentional. My point is refusing to innovate (taking the risk and effort that comes with it) will lead to the announcement eventually. It may be they kept operations small, were happy to sip cocktails on the bitch while monitoring production on their laptop, and now it's time to retire. Nothing wrong with that, a bit of a waste of talent though.
  - parl_match 6mo ago
    > My point is And my point is, don't immediately assume it to be a mistake. :)
numpad0 6mo ago
There's just no way they could have done something like, a split dual purple-gray-gold tri-tone double shot keycaps on lubed gasketed Cherry ultra low profile tactile in black nickel cold hammer forged milled blasted steel chassis with full QMK compatibility and quad nRF53 mesh wireless networking, full wide QCIF microdisplays and native GX16 coiled cable support. They're a Japanese PC peripherals company. Not a hype-revenue-cashflowmaxxing dream YouTuber multi joint venture. The whole keyboard industry is optimized for the latter, and I doubt it can support a real company not subsidized by hype sustainably over time anyway. Typed on my HHKB Lite 2
- mech422 6mo ago
  You forgot the Stabs!
- hakfoo 6mo ago
  The survivors in the industry were the non-enthusiast players. Cherry was selling mechanical switch keyboards for POS and specialty applications for decades before the enthusiast market emerged. Unicomp was addressing the market of terminal-lockin customers who needed a replacement for the IBM Model M (frequently 122-key version) that had finally popped its last rivet at 23 years old. They didn't have to chase trends, minimizing risk and keeping scale high. Mid-price enthusiast players are under the risk of irrelevance from cheaper/better competitors. The higher-end of the market-- the Steelseries, Corsair, Razer, Das Keyboards-- are being perpetually undercut by the Redragons, Akkos, Aulas, and a bunch of AliExpress/Amazon no-names. They might be able to hold some ground by virtue of "You can get it for $89 today at Micro Centre and not have to dig into it too hard", but they're very interchangeable (maybe RGB and programming ecosystems matter for some) Boutique vendors might be able to keep things running by going from trend to trend or relying on a small, dedicated audience-- group buys where everything is pretty much prepaid are probably better than trying to sell at retail and end up on a pile of unsold stock. But I wonder how far off we are from "bespoke to order"-- a wizard with a bunch of knobs but some constraints, and it generates a stack of files that get forwarded to PCB and CNC/3D-printing jobbers, and in 8 weeks you get a parcel from Shenzhen with an assembled keyboard. I'd suspect right now, the small-scale inefficiencies are what holds it back. It's doable but probably too expensive to make a viable product out of.
bigfatkitten 6mo ago
> A great company that made the mistake to stay stagnant. As a customer I’d say that’s a feature, not a bug. Wireless and backlighting are features I actively avoid.
apricot 6mo ago
I bought a Filco Majestouch with Cherry blues, 15 to 20 years ago. I'm still using it, and don't plan on stopping. It's not wireless and doesn't have backlighting or RGB lights on it, but I don't care about any of that. It just works and feels great. It was expensive but worth every dollar — and might very well outlive me.
Ekaros 6mo ago
I feel like it could also be example of product that is so long lasting you simply do not need to replace it. Albeit I have done repairs and switch replacements (due to liquids) it still works after 15 years. With more careful use it is a item that you do not need to replace. Which certainly limits the market size.

cosmic_cheese 6mo ago

The botique keyboard space exploded during that time, especially towards the latter half of the 10's and through the pandemic years. There were countless one-off group buys across the price spectrum all offering more interesting products, and in the last 5 years or so there's been a number of vendors offering enthusiast-level features in mass production boards (e.g. Keychron). It's definitely not a market where one can stand still.

shrx 6mo ago
I bought a ~60€ Redragon linear switches keyboard for my office desk to replace the company-provided shitty Logitech, not expecting much, and was very surprised by the quality. So competition is definitely tough.
Blackthorn 6mo ago
We've lost some classic names in keyboards. It's not mechanical but Keytronic made amazing rubber dome keyboards, and they left the business. I don't know what I'm going to do if I ever need to replace my current one.
logicallee 6mo ago
and they all suck. I bought the most silent and lowest-weight keys I could, and typing on it takes a ton of force and is very loud. Typing should be almost no force whatsoever and should not produce any sound at all, just the slightest bump you could imagine. Instead, it's loud enough to disturb whoever I'm with, while feeling like I'm not only getting my thoughts out but kneading dough at 100 WPM. It's nicer to type with just my thumbs on a tiny phone's glass virtual keyboard, as I'm doing now. true, at zero mm of key travel it's not ideal, but at least I'm not kneading dough while I do it.
- dmos62 6mo ago
  Have you considered kneading some dough for strength training?
- andrewf 6mo ago
  Some keyboard enthusiasts obtain lighter keypresses by adding weight to the underside of the keys.
hirako2000 6mo ago
In another universe, I can see Filco ergonomic keyboards. LED glass-screen keys that actually made sense on the very high end. Hot swaps. An enterprise line up with partnership with Dell and other big manufacturers, an affordable 3y lifespan silent mechanical keyboard would have pleased big tech workers. They had the talent and cash flow to make it happen and take the lead with economies of scale. Nothing wrong with sticking to what works, but the way to beat pale competition is to innovate.

jbm 6mo ago

I still have 4 of these, even one of their bluetooth ones. They all work, except a 15 year old one whose USB cable got frayed and fell apart. (I bought a USB-C port to see if I could fix it, yet another incomplete project) I agree with op who said that they aren't getting better but calling it stagnant is more than I would say. The build quality was quite high and they clearly focused on that, and the price reflected that. I own another mechanical keyboard that I bought from Amazon during the pandemic and I already started getting ghost tapping (I only used it for dev work so I was more than a little annoyed to see it). Not saying it is perfect though. They clearly were a Windows-first shop and that never changed. I've never managed to get the 変換 key and the other Kanji keys working in Linux or on Mac, much to my annoyance.

cosmic_cheese 6mo ago
Often behavior like ghost-tapping, double-inputs, etc aren't actually an issue with the board, but rather with the switches. A lot of newer boards come with hotswappable switches which makes it easy to fix this without soldering. Problems with the circuit board or the firmware it runs are certainly possible of course, but what I've seen most of are switch issues.

ginko 6mo ago

Pretty much this. I used a majestouch for ages. A good decade later I got a Ducky One 2 for work and the difference in quality and features is huge. I ended up replacing the Majestouch not too long after.

parl_match 6mo ago

> A great company that made the mistake to stay stagnant. Sometimes, a company like this is very few people who made something that they wanted and were happy to find others wanted it as well. So you call it a mistake, but it may very well have been intentional.

hirako2000 6mo ago
I think intentional. My point is refusing to innovate (taking the risk and effort that comes with it) will lead to the announcement eventually. It may be they kept operations small, were happy to sip cocktails on the bitch while monitoring production on their laptop, and now it's time to retire. Nothing wrong with that, a bit of a waste of talent though.
- parl_match 6mo ago
  > My point is And my point is, don't immediately assume it to be a mistake. :)

numpad0 6mo ago

There's just no way they could have done something like, a split dual purple-gray-gold tri-tone double shot keycaps on lubed gasketed Cherry ultra low profile tactile in black nickel cold hammer forged milled blasted steel chassis with full QMK compatibility and quad nRF53 mesh wireless networking, full wide QCIF microdisplays and native GX16 coiled cable support. They're a Japanese PC peripherals company. Not a hype-revenue-cashflowmaxxing dream YouTuber multi joint venture. The whole keyboard industry is optimized for the latter, and I doubt it can support a real company not subsidized by hype sustainably over time anyway. Typed on my HHKB Lite 2

mech422 6mo ago
You forgot the Stabs!
hakfoo 6mo ago
The survivors in the industry were the non-enthusiast players. Cherry was selling mechanical switch keyboards for POS and specialty applications for decades before the enthusiast market emerged. Unicomp was addressing the market of terminal-lockin customers who needed a replacement for the IBM Model M (frequently 122-key version) that had finally popped its last rivet at 23 years old. They didn't have to chase trends, minimizing risk and keeping scale high. Mid-price enthusiast players are under the risk of irrelevance from cheaper/better competitors. The higher-end of the market-- the Steelseries, Corsair, Razer, Das Keyboards-- are being perpetually undercut by the Redragons, Akkos, Aulas, and a bunch of AliExpress/Amazon no-names. They might be able to hold some ground by virtue of "You can get it for $89 today at Micro Centre and not have to dig into it too hard", but they're very interchangeable (maybe RGB and programming ecosystems matter for some) Boutique vendors might be able to keep things running by going from trend to trend or relying on a small, dedicated audience-- group buys where everything is pretty much prepaid are probably better than trying to sell at retail and end up on a pile of unsold stock. But I wonder how far off we are from "bespoke to order"-- a wizard with a bunch of knobs but some constraints, and it generates a stack of files that get forwarded to PCB and CNC/3D-printing jobbers, and in 8 weeks you get a parcel from Shenzhen with an assembled keyboard. I'd suspect right now, the small-scale inefficiencies are what holds it back. It's doable but probably too expensive to make a viable product out of.

bigfatkitten 6mo ago

> A great company that made the mistake to stay stagnant. As a customer I’d say that’s a feature, not a bug. Wireless and backlighting are features I actively avoid.

apricot 6mo ago

I bought a Filco Majestouch with Cherry blues, 15 to 20 years ago. I'm still using it, and don't plan on stopping. It's not wireless and doesn't have backlighting or RGB lights on it, but I don't care about any of that. It just works and feels great. It was expensive but worth every dollar — and might very well outlive me.

Ekaros 6mo ago

I feel like it could also be example of product that is so long lasting you simply do not need to replace it. Albeit I have done repairs and switch replacements (due to liquids) it still works after 15 years. With more careful use it is a item that you do not need to replace. Which certainly limits the market size.