I often hear, “You should never cheap out on a good office chair, shoes, underpants, backpack etc…” but what are some items that you would feel OK to cheap out on?
This can by anything from items such as: expensive clothing brands to general groceries.
computer keyboards i will never understand paying more than 20 bucks for one
Then you should avoid going down the rabbit hole of mechanical keyboards.
I made this mistake, some friend talked me on to them. I wouldn’t say worst mistake, caz I have a nice keyboard now, but dang it was expensive and not even close as good as how much it was hyped.
I thought the same with a cheap mechanical I bought, then I tried to go back to my old, still usable keyboard after some days and for some reason it doesn’t feel so usable anymore.
I agree that going from a barely usable to a cheap mechanical is a huge jump, but the differences between mechanical and other mechanical isn’t as big as ppl in the hobby make it seem. I couldn’t have gotten a very similar experience for 70% less.
A basic mechanical keyboard will last 20+ years and will be a nice typing experience for all those years. I’m old enough to have seen mechanical keyboards go for 20 or more years under heavy use and plenty of non-mechanical keyboards going bad after 5 years or so with similar use. It’s a great purchase.
I bought a couple different super cheap mechs (browns for when my partner is sleeping, blues for KLIK KLACC) and they’re SO MUCH BETTER than I expected. They were under 40USD each and have full RGB.
The best rabbit hole!
My refurbished IBM Model M from 1984 agrees.
My nice mechanical keyboard is 13 years old. They last, and if you’re going to have something for decades, why not have a nice one?
I’m not sure if it’s still the case but even in cheap keyboards if you pay a bit more you they will have better controller that will let you press more keys at once which is important for gaming. I got my mechanical keyboard couple years ago and overnight I stopped making so many typos and I can type much faster. My plan was to check the keyboard out for a week, write a ton of documentation for work and send it back but now I don’t regret paying extra for it, in fact I think it’s the second most important component of you computer after the fastest hard drive you can get.
I’m assuming that by “hard drive”, you mean “don’t actually use a hard drive unless you need extra storage”. You’d want an SSD for speed.
I agree in principle, but knowing what people pay for a kb that doesn’t even have a numpad I would raise the usefulness cutoff to around 100.