Hands-on with Cherry MX2A switches: A lot less wobble, a little more confusion
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"But many mechanical switches these days don't add anything to the market. They either rip off what Cherry already offers with a cheaper price tag or only help mechanical keyboard makers save money by not paying another company for switches."
Not sure I necessarily agree with the tone or effect of this statement at all. The patent system is designed to protect designers for a period of time and then when that expires the idea flows into the general market for others to produce and capitalize on. Lower prices is one of the main beneficial outcomes of this. It's working exactly as intended. Are you arguing for eternal patent protection? Price fixing? I'm not sure. While much more simple in terms of design, should we not have a wide range of phillips screwdrivers of varying quality on the market? Should we just have one very high quality very expensive version?
Not sure I necessarily agree with the tone or effect of this statement at all. The patent system is designed to protect designers for a period of time and then when that expires the idea flows into the general market for others to produce and capitalize on. Lower prices is one of the main beneficial outcomes of this. It's working exactly as intended. Are you arguing for eternal patent protection? Price fixing? I'm not sure. While much more simple in terms of design, should we not have a wide range of phillips screwdrivers of varying quality on the market? Should we just have one very high quality very expensive version?
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I agree with everything you said but also: the cheaper competition like Gateron and Kailh make switches that a lot of people prefer to Cherry.
I like clicky switches and think the much cheaper Gateron Blues and Kailh Box Whites are superior to Cherry's offering.
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Are the colors switched up here? Browns should be silent, other than bottoming out, as tactile switches while Blues would be the clicky option where I'd expect sound to be a consideration. Either way, it doesn't sound like these do anything really major for anyone willing to go down the rabbit hole of custom and non-cherry switches. I do like brown and other tactile switches and a more discernible bump there isn't a bad thing IMO but you did already have plenty of other options that offer that already.
EDIT- Currently using Kailh Speed Copper switches in my Z15 and have a set of Akko Jelly Blues waiting to be swapped in.
EDIT 2 - what is the difference between the two springs? I've looked and can't tell what is supposed to be the meaningful difference. The new spring definitely still has lube on it and looks a little longer and has one less coil but none of that really seems to be a different "type" of spring. The Akko Jelly blues have a two stage spring and I can see how that is different in the spring.
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I completely disagree, makers like Gateron, Kailh, JWK, etc, are the innovators these days - they track closer to the enthusiast market and do way more experimentation with housing materials, levels of tactility, stem pole length, spring types (progressive, multi-stage, etc), and offer actual improvements like less housing wobble, smoothness via mold polishing, factory lubing - if anything, maybe Cherry is starting to catch up with what the other makers have been focusing on for the past half decade.
Cherry has the name recognition and I still use MX blacks for most of my builds given my preference for their acoustic profile, but damn if they don't require more modding than most of the other stuff on the market for an enthusiast level build (applying switch films to Cherry housings is a must, they benefit greatly from break-in and lubing and even then I still would not expect them to be as smooth as the best from Gateron and JWK, also, stock Cherry springs have been regarded as complete trash for the entirety of my time in the hobby, not consistent from switch to switch and always ping).
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Well, I liked the Cherry-style red switches I got from Keychron just fine. But they were a massive pain to open up and lube by hand. But I have moved on, and with luck found my old favorite tactile switches (Reds are linear, which I find too easy to bottom out). Those old favorites were Glorious Pandas. Very similar to the original Pandas which have always been widely popular.
Now keyboard maker Mode (modedesigns.com) came out with their own switches, and I love them as much as I do their keyboards (Sonnet and Envoy so far). My new favorites are their Anthricite Silent Tactiles. If you need quiet tactiles, you really should buy a sampler set from Mode (I think a sampler pack is $2) and give them a try. Everything Mode does makes me call them the Apple of mechanical keyboards (not meaning compared to Apple's keyboards though, which are very disappointing).
Now keyboard maker Mode (modedesigns.com) came out with their own switches, and I love them as much as I do their keyboards (Sonnet and Envoy so far). My new favorites are their Anthricite Silent Tactiles. If you need quiet tactiles, you really should buy a sampler set from Mode (I think a sampler pack is $2) and give them a try. Everything Mode does makes me call them the Apple of mechanical keyboards (not meaning compared to Apple's keyboards though, which are very disappointing).
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I love how detailed this article is on a topic I'm very interested in. And assumed virtually no one else was until this article
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Today I learned that there are people who get into passionate arguments about the exact grade and viscosity of grease to use on each of thirty different types of keyboard switches, and who consider disagreements about the relative quality of those switches to be tantamount to religious warfare.
In all seriousness, after a couple of decades of putting up with whatever generic Logitech crap happened to be in stock that month, it is rather nice to see that there is now a community of entrepreneurs making seriously good quality equipment to fit almost every possible personal preference. I don't see additional product offerings to be a confusion-causing problem, but rather a sign of a successful market that is actively tracking customer preferences and trying to adapt to as many needs and niches as possible.
Anyone who doesn't want to go down the rabbit hole need only go as far as "full size or mini? Clicky, firm, or smooth? How many dollars?" and end up with something that'll probably suit them just fine, without caring which variant of whose parts is inside.
Anyone who doesn't want to go down the rabbit hole need only go as far as "full size or mini? Clicky, firm, or smooth? How many dollars?" and end up with something that'll probably suit them just fine, without caring which variant of whose parts is inside.
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The next level is a full adaptive suspension for each key (controlled by the pc to which the KB is attached). In the event of loss of control, the keyspension fails to MacPherson strut.
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Agreed since they lost their patent I have bought entire mechanical keyboards for less than the price they wanted just for a key kit. Not sure why "lower prices" is viewed as not a relevant improvement for the market. Weird article.
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You really have to zoom the image to see it, but for the one on the left the middle section (really the whole long section that doesn't include the stuck together coils) is very slightly wider than the stuck together coils at the top and bottom. They say this means the loose coils hardly ever touch the rest of the key when they get compressed when the key is pushed. Here - a zoom - it's easier to see the left loose coils are slightly wider than the left tight coils, unlike the one on the right where they're all the same width.
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I was like you, once. "Oh look," I said, "an article about keyboards and switches! How interesting!"I love how detailed this article is on a topic I'm very interested in. And assumed virtually no one else was until this article
Right now there are three - no, four, I forgot about an old dust-covered membrane crap-fest sitting in the corner - keyboards on my desk. I have boxes of keycaps and switches stacked nearby, and another new set of switches are on their way as we speak. When they get here, I will install them in a tiny, 40% ortholinear keyboard. In order for this keyboard to be in any way useful I have had to set up and memorize multiple layer modifiers and break decades of muscle memory. It is a pointless, silly thing and yet I love it.
You're standing at a precipice, my friend. Be wary.
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Can't wait to see those keyboards with full dynamic spool valve suspensions, which reacts the same no matter how hard you're hammering a keyboard - either some light emails or full-bore in-game key spamming. You know, valves just like in Formula 1.
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Upgrade to a Model F if you can at all afford it. I bought a repro a few months ago and the improvement is definite: lighter, easier actuation and a satisfying click at the bottom.
Mind that it is louder.
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How about a less judgmental tone? Oooh, those "copycats", "ripping off" Cherry. How about "inspired by"? "Building upon"?
Cherry had a patent for 20 years. It expired. Now that design knowledge is part of the common baseline.
This is like in the 1980s when mob boss John Gotti was on trial, and all the informants helping to put away a murderous criminal kept being described - not by Gotti's lawyers, but by the press reporting on the story - as "turncoats", "rats" and "snitches"
Cherry had a patent for 20 years. It expired. Now that design knowledge is part of the common baseline.
This is like in the 1980s when mob boss John Gotti was on trial, and all the informants helping to put away a murderous criminal kept being described - not by Gotti's lawyers, but by the press reporting on the story - as "turncoats", "rats" and "snitches"
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this article is frankly bizarre
[edit: because of the judgy tone regarding other manufacturers since Cherry's patent expired. not because it's about key switches. keyboards are important!]
[edit: because of the judgy tone regarding other manufacturers since Cherry's patent expired. not because it's about key switches. keyboards are important!]
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Honestly the old models work fine, as do the clones I'm typing this on right now. It's hard to differentiate by changing your product just slightly.
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I did open the image in another tab and zoom in and still couldn't tell. I ended up putting a piece of paper next to my monitor to finally make out that the coils were a little bigger than the ends. That fits calling it a "barrel" spring but that wasn't clear just looking at the pictures.
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There are a lot of options in the market because the patent expired, that’s normal. I have a collection of about 60 mostly tactile switches from several manufacturers and would rate Cherry in the middle that field of choices. For me at least, that means there has been significant value added to the marketplace by these “copycats”.
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The grease (on the left) and that super busy background certainly don't help!
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Imagine a DRM scheme that only disables certain keys... Randomly. And changes every day.
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The springs are like Laurel (old) and Hardy (new). The new one has a wider diameter in the middle.
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There was a blessed period from about 2016 (by which time clone makers had the manufacturing quality down) and about 2020-2021 when a bunch of experimentation and new switches came out that were inexpensive and brought meaningful changes and options, like spring weights, sound profiles, stem shapes (on the inside), housing materials, etc. In the past ~2 years, though, the market has been FLOODED with so many new switches that are mostly just remixes where the only innovation is the color (the housing top, bottom, and stem colors, which can be almost anything you want) with various spring weights. There are dozens of essentially identical switches from dozens of smaller vendors. It's harder to shop.
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Absolutely.
I use Keychron keyboards with Gateron Pro Brown switches, for example. I think I found my ultimate combination and will keep using it forever. They feel much, much better than any Cherry brown switches. I have Holy Pandas sitting unused in the cupboard. That is how good Gateron Pro switches are for me.
Cherry would have to do something really amazing in order to reclaim the throne (assuming they really ever had it) in mechanical switch world. This doesn't sound like it.
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Keyboard users definitely do need better keyswitches, and since the MX2A keyswitches appear to be just that, I would say that this should be welcomed. Of course, what I'd really like to see are affordable newly-manufactured beam spring keyboards!
I found it very sad that a Chinese company that made a buckling-spring keyboard just gave up when that keyboard turned out to be one of the world's worst rather than one of the world's best. The problem was that the keyboard bent when people typed on it; that could easily have been fixed without adding too much to the materials cost of the keyboard (the only drawback would be that it would have been a little thicker, if the bottom surface had been given a little bracing).
I found it very sad that a Chinese company that made a buckling-spring keyboard just gave up when that keyboard turned out to be one of the world's worst rather than one of the world's best. The problem was that the keyboard bent when people typed on it; that could easily have been fixed without adding too much to the materials cost of the keyboard (the only drawback would be that it would have been a little thicker, if the bottom surface had been given a little bracing).
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The issue I had with Cherry was sales. Our project is looking to buy keyboard switches by the 10's of thousands. Cherry and their distributors wouldn't respond to any inquiries.
Kaihl sent samples and a catalog. Was able to confirm an uncommon switch was NOT the one we needed, and had dimensional drawings of all their switches to ensure component compatibility.
Omron at least gave a polite F off.
(For the curious, the project is a control panel that may be in service for decades. Pushbutton switches with 50 million cycle ratings and can be fitted with custom caps is a big plus.)
Kaihl sent samples and a catalog. Was able to confirm an uncommon switch was NOT the one we needed, and had dimensional drawings of all their switches to ensure component compatibility.
Omron at least gave a polite F off.
(For the curious, the project is a control panel that may be in service for decades. Pushbutton switches with 50 million cycle ratings and can be fitted with custom caps is a big plus.)
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Not to people who spend hours per day typing. As with any critical tool, we all develop preferences, and while this hobby community may represent a niche, enthusiasts are willing to invest time and money to get the tool they want. I'm picky about the knives I use in the kitchen, as an analogy--even though unlike keyboards, good knives require maintenance (honing) every time they are used, and more extensive work (sharpening) periodically.
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wha?
I do spend hours a day typing. I use Kailh Blue switches in a split keyboard (a UHK). I spent hundreds on this thing.
The bizarreness is with regards to the "everyone copying poor Cherry" tone.
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Beam Spring Round 2 Keyboard (various sizes) – Brand New Model F Keyboards
www.modelfkeyboards.com
Depending on what "affordable" means to you.
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