I'm still using my Drop CTRL keyboard from 2018. I haven't bought another keyboard since then because it's a good keyboard.
Going through my order history, everything I've bought from their early days are still in use or usable. Keycaps. Mics. Pocket knives. A leather belt. Titanium reusable straws. A couple of headphones and DAC/amps. Ultralight camping/hiking gear.
There hasn't been any reason I needed more of those things I already had, so unless Drop continuously expanded its customer base or product offerings, there wasn't a strong case for repeat business. Then the quality and uniqueness of their offerings dropped and I had even less reason to buy from them.
I don't know what the solution is for survival for retailers and manufacturers offering long lasting products, but I really hope someone figures it out because I really don't like how the world is racing towards disposable low quality junk. But disposable products leads to repeat business.
The manufacturer's problem needs more capital, because it is also solved through diversification. If the total market for space oscillators is 120,000 a year, with about a 2-3% annual growth, making the best space oscillators has a cap. You'll need to figure out how to turn your expertise in space oscillators into neighboring products - space modulators and electromagnetic oscillators, perhaps - each of which is an R&D investment itself.
Perhaps in a textbook economy, yes; but in the U.S. economy that Massdrop operated in, continued sales of products hinged upon wages being available to spend on optional desires. That economics assumption has not held: most people’s inflation-adjusted pay decreased over Massdrop’s lifetime while the inflation-adjusted costs of necessary goods increased (thanks, enshittification and shrinkflation!), and so their potential customer pool would have been steadily draining throughout their operating years. The private equity model of ‘diversify to generate horizontal revenue’ only functions in a wages-dropping economy for retailers selling necessary goods, such as Walmart; for Massdrop, whose goods are exclusively non-essential, they had little chance to survive by increasing product diversity. (And effectively none whatsoever, considering how small their niche was to begin with!)
If it's now a glorified Amazon, who cares?
So not sure if that was really the issue, people ordered keycaps because they liked the design, e.g. the Dasher MT3 set was super popular due to a similar one being used in the "Severance" show.
If you think about it, keycaps makes sense strategically. They're cheap and small enough for hoarding, with a wide range of easy customization, with all sorts of trends that could be capitalized on for seasonal/repeat customers, they also last basically forever and are light so it's dirt cheap to ship. All for probably 90%+ profit margin.
Why grind away at heavy, expensive, complex, fragile, or specialized hardware for thin margins when you can ship colorful plastic at high markup? Sell the disposable personalized accessories to the hardware: keycaps, cases, dongles, cables, straps!
Well, customers like you wise up and cut out the middleman and buy straight from the source. If there's a profit to be made for those things, almost anyone can make those things for niche sized demand.
Seems like Corsair is taking it one step further, why even have a quality/niche hardware base? Just do trendy accessories or modifications to commodity hardware.
They ended up having a lot of non-group buy things like extremely esoteric keycaps probably only a couple dozen people on earth are willing to spend money on.
- available faster from Amazon
- available cheaper from AliExpress
- sometimes both faster and cheaper from the manufacturer
And Massdrop didn't provide exceptionally good customer service or warranties.
The best thing I bought from them was a pair of JBL LSR-305 powered monitors for $180. Great bedroom speakers at about a 50% discount.
I still have most of the things I bought from Massdrop - pocket knife, leather belt, headphones, etc. Those products lasted.
It's both a lot more interesting and a lot more risky than Massdrop used to be in the sense that there is lots of stuff that even the old Massdrop never would have offered but you're sending a random person on the internet money (sometimes hundreds of dollars) and hoping to receive a product many months later. They have added a "vendor trust" program in recent years to better help inform buyers but there is always risk.
I too would like to know. I bought many keyboard build kits from massdrop back in the day as well as my terrific Sennheiser headphones.
I recently discovered they're local to me but seem to only do custom items now.
Gandalf wept...
Where does one find that nowadays?
They even sent me a gift box because my blog post about the keyboard had driven so much traffic. It had a CST mouse in it (among other things).
Still using the mouse.
Nowadays you can buy awesome small batch keyboards from small vendors.
If Corsair still own the design, they could simply reimplement the original earcups/hinge mechanism from the Oppo as it was super solid.
I have only ever shopped for RAM by comparing specs and price.
I want affordable RAM, not merch collabs for overpriced rgb heatsinks.
How is Drop going to compete internally for their resources (time/attention/rtc.) when the entire consumer RAM market can’t?
https://www.headphonesty.com/2026/03/sennheiser-officially-d...
By this time next year we'd be seeing some Chinese owned company producing "Sennheiser HD9000000000+ Pro" headphones that are leftover Shrek themed earbuds that smoke when you turn the volume up too high.
It's actually much worse than the linked article though, since it's corporate BS style AI generated slop.
https://www.sonova.com/en/sonova-presents-renewed-strategy-e...
There is no way that MassDrop was ever going to justify that kind of capital investment. VC is such an inefficient and frankly delusional form of capital deployment at this point -- they have no idea what they're doing. It ironically looks a lot like central planning, where the VCs themselves invest with the intention of picking the winners and losers themselves.
This company should've bootstrapped and remained small-and-manageable. Not every business, not even most businesses, should raise money with the intention of becoming a "unicorn," it is nonsensical and this model has a lot of deleterious effects for our society, namely and most obviously enshittification when the outcome doesn't justify the investment.
Can you suggest other saner forms? For example, having experts pick, government pick, or only one single debt instruments all have problems with the kinds of investments VC funds, not to mention that they also have their share of ludicrous and bad investments.
Also please suggest how you’d stop VC as is at its core a private investment club - you and other investors get together to invest capital into a profitable but risky venture. The only way to stop it would be to either ban private capital or to ban coordination of capital which on net ends up significantly worse.
1. Large firms investing in early r&d instead of aquisition.
2. Its a symptom of decades of poor economic policy rewarding speculation, to a scale that impacts society by disencentivizing stable investments that benefit humanity. Main lever causing this is through Federal reserve poor policy since 200
It’s also what Xerox and Bell labs were doing in the 70s and what Google, Meta, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft etc are doing today but it took smaller more nimble players to actually do anything with the research. Case in point: transformers came from Google.
