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.
It's definitely not a market where one can stand still.
Nothing wrong with sticking to what works, but the way to beat pale competition is to innovate.
Typed on my HHKB Lite 2
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.
To be fair, you get what you pay for - I can’t really justify the fancier options since the cheap ones are good enough (I even occasionally return to my backup Logitech K120 and it’s okay for getting things done), but my daily drivers are Redragon and a bunch of lesser known budget options and they just work. At the same time, I had a case where a particular model (I think it was an older Genesis) developed the issue of the same keys not responding both before and after RMA and in the new keyboard the store sent me, must have been a bad batch/design.
I’ve had some keyboards with Kailh or Outemu switches for years and they’re okay, a bit hit or miss. Then again I have like three mechanical keyboards in total (and since I don’t need one for when I’m in the countryside anymore or office where I got o-rings to make it silent, I treat it as a stockpile of backups) so I’m probably good for years to come.
The more expensive options will buy you a bit more consistency across the board and decrease the risk of just getting a bad product.
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.
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.
As a customer I’d say that’s a feature, not a bug.
Wireless and backlighting are features I actively avoid.
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.
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.
I'd absolutely buy another one of these right now if it were showing even the slightest signs of wear, but it's not. Bulletproof. The only keyboard I still use that's older is a Model M.
Filco really put quality first. It's a shame to see them go.
My daily driver at home for over a decade is a keyboard that I had built myself around community-designed replacement parts for the Filco Majestouch TKL. This included a controller to customise the firmware, and that was my first start in programming microcontrollers.
Some of the switches started dying at the same time last year. I guess I tipped over the lifetime of cherry switches.
I looked around but there are so few UK TKLs. I didn't want a layout change of page/home/end cluster or lose "useless" keys ins/pause/etc. (I remap them and now rely on them). I didn't like the look of prebuilts from Keychron or want to pay £500 or mess with shady "group buys" for parts.
So I bought a bag of switches and a soldering iron instead and expect to get another 15 years out of them.
Happy customer but I guess not a repeat customer.
I still have it, I should open it up and clean it again, probably just a dirty contact or something. Solid piece of gear.
currently using a NuPhy Field75 because it looks and sounds cool, lol. The linear magnetic switches are a neat feature but in practice I don't use any features that it theoretically supports.
I have a Leopold with MX brown keys. Bought in 2012. Last year the left ctrl (or maybe left alt? can't remember) started to sometimes not work. I took the back cover off and the soldering job was horrid everywhere. And on that key the solder was mostly non-existent. I touched it up and a few others. All good now.
The only noise from them is if I bang away at them too hard, which is generally a sign that I’m frustrated and need to go for a walk. (It’s mostly my wife or kid who point out I’m being too noisy, and they are right 99% of the time.)
Sad to see Filco go. I’ll keep an eye on eBay for any bargains to keep a spare of two.
It made possible when chromium-based browsers (Chrome, Edge, Opera) implemented WebHID API.
Now, if I couldn't download it and run myself, that would be a different story (vendor lock-in). But I can, so I think WebHID is godsend.
PS: By the way, the most popular RC (quadcopters/airplanes/helicopters) flight controller configurer is https://app.betaflight.com/ . It's a pretty complex tool with a tons of bells and whistles.
Unlike rubber dome keyboards which trigger at the bottom of the stroke, mechanical keyboards trigger mid-stroke. You don't have to bottom out the keys, which reduces shock loading of your fingers. If you actually want to bottom out the keys, you can approximate the rubber dome feeling by using a linear keyswitch modded with a soft o-ring around the stem to cushion the impact.
> plus what's with the stripped down layouts?
The most common kind of 'squished down' is because it's "small like a laptop keyboard". The common sentiment seems to be: "I don't use those keys often, so I don't need them on the keyboard".
Though there's another kind of small keyboard: small keyboards with multiple thumb keys. Multiple thumb keys then allow the thumbs to do much more than a typical keyboard, & so allow bringing the full functionality of the keyboard to within reach of the hands on home row.
I use an IBM model M today with a Model H controller replacement.
I also have the Filco keycap puller. Keyboard cleaned and saved!
I now use a Keychron K2 with browns. My fingers are getting too old to use blues on a regular basis.
