A Rant About Mechanical Keyboards

You’ve heard it a thousand times; “mechanical keyboards are much more durable than membrane keyboards”. Everyone and their dog repeats the same mantra. In these three cases presented below, that statement appears to be nothing but false advertisement. Yes, this is an anecdotal rant of sorts, but I think I’m starting to notice a pattern here…

First I should mention that we are always very careful with all our equipment – we do not slam on the keys nor do we abuse or misuse hardware in any other way. We game and we type and that’s about it. I personally even use a dust cover for my mechanical keyboard when it is not in use to minimize unnecessary dust.

Our first failing keyboard was a Corsair Strafe with Cherry MX brown switches, purchased in April 2016. It started to get some minor ‘key chatter’ problems after about a year of daily use on the ‘A’ key – one of the most used keys on a keyboard.

Key chatter is a very common problem with mechanical switches which causes a key to activate twice in quick succession even though it is only pressed once. Searching for key chatter on the web yields millions of results, which tell us how common this issue is. There is specialized software that can alleviate this annoyance to some degree, but as our warranty time ran out, the problems were beyond a mere software fix. This keyboard functioned as advertised for almost a year. That’s not very impressive considering that I’m still using my Razer Lycosa (a comparatively cheap membrane keyboard) daily since December 2011, which still works perfectly and has never skipped a beat.

Our next keyboard was a Corsair Gaming K70 LUX also with Cherry MX brown switches. It has had glowing reviews everywhere. This one was bought in September 2016 and was initially pretty happy with it overall. The volume wheel and media keys were, admittedly a nice touch. It had some weird flickering LED issue, but nothing big. (As did the Strafe, by the way!)

In early 2018 however, as I started to type on it, the ‘L’ key popped off, just like that. It turned out that the plastic in the keycap had cracked and thus didn’t grip on the mechanical switch itself. Upon further investigation, I noticed that most of the keycaps had those same cracks in them!

Corsair offers special replacement keycaps (which are non-standard form factor), but they are almost half of what the keyboard cost to begin, including shipping. What’s more, they are not even available from a retailer here in Sweden. I went back to the retailer and they gave me a replacement keyboard since it was still under warranty.

Getting tired of Corsair’s poor build quality, I decided to find a better mechanical keyboard – one that was universally acclaimed and loved by enthusiasts around the world. I purchased a Ducky One 2 Skyline PBT with Cherry MX blue switches in February 2018. I immediately fell in love with this keyboard. It felt so solid, I loved the clicky keys and the crisp feel of the keycaps. However, only a few months after the purchase, I noticed that the ‘Space bar’ key seemed to double activate occasionally, much like the dreaded key chatter issue. I couldn’t recreate the issue by testing the key however, so I ignored it for a while. Of course the issue only got worse, so I decided to investigate. I found that the feedback click (featured on the Cherry MX blue switch) that is supposed to indicate when the key has reset itself happened way too late. In other words the feedback mechanism of the switch had been offset from its normal position and thus led to accidentally activating the key twice. I submitted a support ticket and once again got a replacement keyboard. Here’s hoping that the new Ducky One 2 will, at least, last its warranty time.

Three mechanical keyboards, all failing in their own ways, within a two year time span – and they have been respected brands, too. We do have another two mechanical keyboards (one HyperX and one Ducky One 2 Backlit) in our offices that were purchased in this same time span and they have not yet shown any issues. Three out of five is still not a good look, in my opinion.

Overall I’m underwhelmed even though I do love to type on mechanical keyboards. It has to be said though, that I prefer durability over the novelty of having nice keys. Is it only Cherry MX switches that are this flimsy and unreliable? Or are we just that unlucky with our hardware? Cherry MX switches do seem to be the most popular ones around and I haven’t personally owned any other type of mechanical switch (yet). I still hope that I’ll get to experience a truly durable mechanical keyboard sometime – one that can match my trusted Razer Lycosa. Until then, I simply can’t believe that mechanical keyboards have superior durability.