The fact that RAM sticks these days and mouse pads come with RGB lighting in them drives me up a wall. My keyboard lights up but thankfully its white only and i set it so low i barely notice it. Still need to replace the fans in my case that have lights, i really don’t care for them and need to figure out what software i need to install to turn off the lights in my CPU cooler and the lights in the GPU
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I can’t fucking stand reds. What is wrong with you people. Jesus.
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I’ve been using a Corsair Strafe red (with cherry mx switches) for the past three years and it’s the only keyboard i’ve had that actually lasted this long. I type and game a lot using this keyboard and the switches are just as sharp now as the day I bought it. I also need key back lighting too as most none backlit keyboards are hard for me to read with my sight issues. The strafe red doesn’t come with any screen or dedicated media keys, it’s just a standard looking 105 key uk keyboard. Nice, simple and reliable. 
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I never claimed to be a functional normal person. I mean i am on BB right now 
The keyboard in question is made with more than just red switches too.
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Simplicity in design is something i also highly value. Too many extra keys and features drives me crazy, especially if the gaming keyboard takes up a ton of extra space that it doesn’t need to be taking.
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You can get RBG power supply cables at this point. And its actively hard to find certain things without lights. The gaming aesthetic has always been woeful. But the whole “put RGB on it and charge an extra $50” might be the most frustrating angle on it yet.
I don’t even remember what switches mine has. I think blues? I kinda can’t feel the difference. I put keycaps on there that look like a rad 70’s van.
ETA: Now that I’m home, I pulled a cap. And horror of horrors. There be reds.
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What is mechanical keyboard? Aren’t they all mechanical?
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Some switches, such as those made by Topre, use an inexpensive, inferior “rubber dome” construction that markedly reduce mechanical complexity.
I would add that the “dark truth” of TFA is more about the gaming industry in general than specific to mechanical keyboards. This is an industry where rich kids drop thousands upon thousands on everything from hyper priced gaming PC’s, gaming chairs, studio quality microphones and camera equipment for streaming, ultra high bandwidth fiber-optic connectivity etc and that’s before you get into gaming peripherals like mice and keyboards. Half the time this industry puts “Gaming” in front of the product title, adds a number of completely useless features like LED lighting and then triples the price. Then they need to replace their $2500 video card every six months to keep it from being obsolete. This is all before you’ve actually spent any money on the games themselves. There is an obscene amount of conspicuous consumption going on with the PC gaming industry. In fact in overall, I think mechanical keyboards are a bargain because they have some value outside of gaming itself or impressing your middle school friends with stupid LED light shows on your hardware.
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LOL. You should also do this:
Step 1:
Add to your linkpost the words “Number 7 will shock you!” in reference to this work of genius:
https://wondermark.com/c1224/
Step 2:
Then, post a Boingboing affiliate/referrer link to a discounted Rob-approved mechanical keyboard on Amazon which has one special feature… yes! Its number 7 key will shock you!
gets coat, tries steak, etc.
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My keyboard is definitely the factor that has been holding me back from claiming that chicken dinner.
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I bought a mechanical keyboard for my gaming PC, only because I found a good deal on a keyboard/lapboard combo. The switches are Cherry MX Red, not that I know the difference. All I know is that it’s loud and heavy, and I can’t hardly type on it at speed. It’s probably because of the feel differences between it, and the other keyboards I use daily, which are membrane-type. Maybe I’ll pick up some of those little O-rings and see if I like it any better. As of yet, I really don’t see the draw.
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In the older USB 1/2 spec that might be true, but I think since version 3 of the USB spec latency is pretty much a non-issue for anything that’s latency sensitive on it.
The issue I have is that most mechanical keyboard makers try to lock you into their proprietary keys which makes it impossible to replace them once they finally get worn down. Also, the abuse of LEDs really is a pain to me. I like the idea of backlit keys at night but they’re too bright in most cases. I wind up disabling them so to not blind me while using it. Just get an Unicomp keyboard if you like that ‘crunchy’ feeling and it’s generally cheaper too if you can get the old IBM branded ones from way back. 
@Headache
Your friend is technically correct. In simple terms, USB is great because it’s flexible, but the flexibility comes at the cost of complexity, and you need more software in between the device and the application to utilize it. It’s capable of sending far, far, larger amounts of data per unit time than PS/2, but that’s also the reason why it’s technically slower–it uses big general-purpose packets of data that go into a queue and have to be parsed by the OS. This can, again very theoretically, create higher input latency. Although you can send more data per unit time, the question isn’t one of bandwidth, but how long it takes the OS to understand that a key has been pressed and to direct that signal to the application that currently has focus.
PS/2 is a dedicated serial bus for human interface devices. It only supports keyboards and mice, the serial data it sends is received by the OS via a dedicated hardware interrupt, and each device gets its own interrupt. In other words, if you have a keyboard and mouse plugged in via PS/2, they effectively have a direct line to the CPU to say, “hey! INPUT!”
The theoretical higher latency of USB stems from two factors, one being that every device attached to the universal serial bus shares the same IRQ as the controller, and the other being that the datagrams sent over USB are much larger. If you had a whole bunch of chatty USB devices hooked up to the bus, in theory it would increase the amount of time needed to parse the data from your keyboard or mouse and deliver it to the appropriate place.
Practically speaking though, it’s not important enough to worry about. There are ways that you could make it produce a small-but-measurable difference, but you’d have to be trying to cause the problem, and there are so many other factors that come into play much more prominently that it’s extraordinarily improbable that it would ever be the deciding factor in the responsiveness of a modern PC game.
@RickMycroft
Yes, PS/2 is actually making a bit of a comeback because of the reputation for lower latency even though it’s not likely to ever be a meaningful factor in performance. They are also popular in cases where USB presents a security risk. About the worst thing you can do over PS2 is exfiltrate data via a key logger. A malicious USB peripheral can theoretically take almost complete, invisible control over a system so in cases where security is of extremely high priority the USB controller may be disabled, or at the very least access to USB ports is physically blocked. You can’t just lock the computer up and use a wired USB keyboard and mouse because it’s very trivial to detach the cable from a peripheral internally and attach something else in its place. Wireless keyboards and mice are avoided in secure applications because they’re kind of a joke with regards to security, so PS/2 is a pretty attractive option when security is of highest concern.
@evilkolbot
The flat thing on the ZX Spectrum is called a membrane keyboard, and they are one of the more unpleasant ways to type. The rubbery ones are terrible, the plastic bubble dome ones are basically a crime against ergonomics. Most computer keyboards use a combination of a rubber dome with a conductive rubber foot on the inside to provide the pressure that holds the key up above a film PCB. The motion of the key is made linear by fitting the key over a slot. Laptop keyboards typically have some kind of butterfly or scissor mechanism in addition to this dome that constrains the motion of the keys because otherwise they would have to be a lot taller. The thin, short throw keys with butterfly switches are the “true” “chiclet” keyboards. You can get desktop keyboards like this, but you can also get ones that are just short-throw versions of the simpler plunger design which some people like just as much, and other people really dislike depending on who you ask.
Mechanical keyboards use key caps that sit on top of discrete individual keyboard switches that typically have metal springs and contacts inside of them. This opens the door for all kinds of variability that’s not available with rubber plungers, and enables the switches to provide things like tactile feedback (you feel a “click” when the switch closes, also some switches produce a sound) and different-but-consistent options in the amount of pressure needed to press the keys down. The way you know how a mechanical keyboard is going to behave is by looking at the type of switches used, which are generally categorized by color. For example if someone says they like “MX blue” switches that is a reference to the Cherry MX blue model switches used in the keyboard, which have large amounts of both tactile and audio feedback when pressed. MX blue switches are often the ones that people complain about causing office noise pollution when they complain about mechanical keyboards in general, but it’s not fair to characterize all mechanical keyboards as noisy as you can often get the same keyboard with the switches of your choice, so for example if you chose Cherry MX black switches, they would have a heavy actuation pressure and no audio or tactile feedback at all.
Practically speaking, it just boils down to personal taste. There is maybe a slightly higher chance that a radom mechanical keyboard will be of higher quality than a random rubber plunger keyboard, but that has much less to do with any sort of inherent superiority and more to do with the fact that the company likely sourced the switches from a company like Cherry. Even if every other part of the keyboard is total junk, the fact that it’s based around a sort of de facto standard (even if the switches didn’t come from Cherry, the manufacturer is probably trying to match Cherry’s specs, or has some standardized specs of their own) means it’s likely to be at least usable even if the rest of the keyboard is junk.
@codinghorror
Why? There are actually a lot of use cases where it makes sense, the port takes up virtually no real estate, and support for it is already likely built in at every other level of hardware. It might be making a comeback in the consumer market because of gamer computer bro-science, but overall its presence is pretty benign compared to a lot of the design anti-patterns that are settling into hardware design these days.
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Having gone from mechanical typewriter to clicky chicklet boards and stayed there ever since, I really am clueless. Is a mon-mechanical KB one of those flat things like on a ZX spectrum? Isn’t using a TV remote preferable to that?
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Lights on ALL the things!!!
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Membrane/dome keyboards have a printed pcb and/or plastic sheet with printed circuits for the individual keys and buttons. Above that sits a rubber sheet with individual rubber domes for each key. A keypress gets registered when the key compresses the dome into the printed circuit. Keys get mounted a variety of ways, but most commonly its just a free-floating plastic post in a plastic hole and the rubber dome also acts as a spring for the keys. Laptop keyboards and low profile keyboards function basically the same. But often do away with the rubber dome sheet in favor of a spring of some sort for the individual keys (even if its just a bit of plastic on the frame). And either have the key contact/trigger the circuit direct or out some other sort of film in there. Its cheap, but not particularly durable. And many people don’t like the feel, particularly of the rubber dome driven ones.
Mechanicals each individual key is its own separate fully mechanical switch. Key caps are connected directly to a post in the key, that post is pushed down through the switch body where a bits of metal make contact closing a circuit and registering a key press. A classic physical electric switch. The switches are soldered or clipped into a PCB, with their posts projecting through a cover plate, key caps slide directly onto the posts. Each switch has a physical metal spring in it to provide tension and to drive the key back up. They keys have a lot more travel, and all sorts of satisfying real bits are hitting against each other noise and bumps. And since each key its own set of physical components if any of those things break they can be individually replaced or repaired. And there’s a lot of customization possible. Where as with the dome keyboards if you tear the rubber sheet, or damage the plastic sheets/circuit board, the whole thing is fucked. And you aren’t likely to find replacement keys without finding another keyboard to pillage.
Wut? With a few exceptions all of the standard name brand switches use identical keycaps. And its easy enough to find keycaps for the odd ball ones, or that are compatible with more than one standard. The vast majority of switches seem to use the same cherry style plus sign shaped posts, or are compatible with keycaps meant for that. The only truly proprietary switches i can think of are the in house ones from Razer and Logitech. And the issue with Razor is down to layout not posts, and replacements seem to be available. Logitech seems to be more of an issue.
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Exactly this… I had a Logitech G510s and it took up way too much space on my desk and the built in screen was nothing more then a gimmick. My daughter has it now and likes it because she likes the shade of pink you can set the back lighting to.
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Razer has some issues for me especially their non-standard spacebar for me. It’s really a pain to replace the spacebar on theirs.
