Cherry with a surprising message to all G80-3000 buyers!

[Hypersphere]

Got rid of all my old Cherry keyboards just in time to avoid contracting Ebola!

[andrewjoy]

A bit late to the party on this but why would one of the last remaining key-switch manufacturers want you to use a shitty piece of crap like that ? I too hate this throw away culture its total bullshit, i mean why throw anything away unless it cannot be fixed.

For example failed monitors, if only the LCD is bad rip the logic board and power supply out and keep them possibly even the casing, you never know when you will need them especially if you are in a business and have several but most businesses will junk the whole thing total waste of money. Get a laptop that's beyond repair ? Strip the thing every single screw only throw away the broken parts, that way if you get another that has failed you can fix it. I am also convinced modern consumer electronics ( TV's DVD players and so on ) are designed to crap out after a set amount of time and good luck fixing them with all the custom ICs and potted power supply's. This is part of the reason i like plasmas (putting far superior picture quality less ghosting and better blacks aside for a moment). Sure they are complex but its all off the shelf components so if a sustain board fails as long as its not the chip you should be good to fix it.

There should be some sort of law that all appliances ( washing machine microwave TV) and so have to be easy to repair and easy to access things that may need to be replaced ( such as a motor on a washing machine), but as with everything in this modern age all people care about is how shiny it is and how thin it is.

[seebart]

I did not expect this kind of lame markting campain from a company so much a part of mechanical keyboards and the history of these. But I guess the marketing, advertising and sales people felt these are smart and convincing arguments. Bringing out the CHERRY 60th anniversary special edtion G80-3060HLCUS-0/2 the way they did does not fit in any of this crap though. They´re celebrating the G80 60th and at the same time telling people to toss their old hardware! Sad and embarrassing Cherry! I guess their sales are going down. Personally I only own vintage Cherry boards. But I´m sure that Cherry would argue this particular advertising is aimed at their "average user" customer, not their mechanical enthusiast customer who spends €€€ on the G80 60th.I like your letter to them Halvar, the answer is of course pretty worthless. Their not saying anything really. They like old hardware too but everybody needs new hardware! Right. It´s all about sales my friends, but this sales pitch is worth shit. Lame Cherry. They should be going the other way back into G80 develpoment. One of the few companies left that could truly bring the mechanical keyboard back BIG. Imagine if they came out with a new G80 based TKL board. They could sell that for 150+ Euros and it would sell. Morons.

[bhtooefr]

The thing is, Cherry doesn't actually care all that much any more, keyboards are not their main market.

It's individual switches (and sure as hell not MX) for automotive applications. Which is, IIRC, the same fate that Alps SKCM/SKCL suffered - their manufacturer focusing on automotive.

[seebart]

The thing is, Cherry doesn't actually care all that much any more, keyboards are not their main market.

It's individual switches (and sure as hell not MX) for automotive applications. Which is, IIRC, the same fate that Alps SKCM/SKCL suffered - their manufacturer focusing on automotive.

I´m sure that´s true. But they do care enough to start this strange campain.

[Jmneuv]

The reply to halvar's letter is frustratingly in line with the whole campaign.. they don't get it at all.
That money spent on the web-campaign would probably have paid for a G80 case+caps redesign.

[seebart]

The reply to halvar's letter is frustratingly in line with the whole campaign.. they don't get it at all.
That money spent on the web-campaign would probably have paid for a G80 case+caps redesign.

well I´d say Cherry does not want "to get it". For whatever reason their mechanical keyboard segment is not that important to them anymore. Could be various different reasons. Production costs, strategy change etc.

[Jmneuv]

The PR dude sure doesn't want to, he's more interested in his stupid car than in getting a grip on what he's actually dealing with.

[seebart]

He´s got his orders of course. Those guys can never really say what they think personally. It´s all product sales strategy. The comparison to the car was nonsense anyway.

[andrewjoy]

as long as they keep producing switches i could not care less if they make the keyboards themselves or not

[Halvar]

I agree with seebart -- I would give that guy some slack, admitting that he does like vintage stuff personally is probably as far as he could go. I think he does have a valid point in saying that while it's nice to use an oldtimer as a personal item, it's a different story for a business, to which the campaign is geared. For rubber dome boards, replacing cheap keyboards instead of having someone deep cleaning them is indeed more economic for a business (I won't talk about the ecologic side). And we all know most rubber dome boards deteriorate quickly.

The problem for me is that they didn't picture an old rubber dome board like the G83-6000 in their campaign but an old G80-3000, a mechanical model they still sell today, and they don't even suggest any mechanical models as replacements. The best keyboard model Cherry sells today in terms of quality is still the G80-3000, which actually was "designed in the 80s". Moreover, some of their statements are really far-fetched -- like the one that older keyboards tend to be technically outdated.

[seebart]

as long as they keep producing switches i could not care less if they make the keyboards themselves or not

that is more important (to us), true.

yes I agree with you on every point Halvar. I´m sure that the G80 "designed in the 80s" is just too oldish sounding for their marketing strategy. And let´s face it we (us at DT) are an unusual group with our fascination for old hardware.

[andrewjoy]

the lack of mechanical keybords in the mainstream ( excluding gamers) i think is more of a dont knwo it exists kind fo deal . Ther are always people who want quality product but they don't even know its there they just buy crappy rubber domes as they don't know better and just assume that's how keyboards are.

[bhtooefr]

It takes me 2 minutes to swap out a rubber dome that maybe costs $10, it takes an hour to properly clean a keyboard, and that's assuming it doesn't need repairs. Seeing as I definitely make more than $10/hr...

And, usually, even a cheap rubber dome is going to last the 4 years that I swap them out on (my client replaces computers every four years, and they come with new keyboards), to the point that we send half the keyboards back with the machines going for lease return.

So, the economic argument, when disposing of e-waste is cheap, is absolutely biased towards cheap keyboards.

[seebart]

Yes Andrew there are also people like me who grew up with mechanical keyboards but forgot all about them in the 90's and got back to quality keyboards just a few years ago.[emoji14]

[andrewjoy]

exactly the case, i had an acorn it was not mechanical switches but it had springs over membrane kind of like acer. Then i had a cherry rubber dome , still quite nice. Then came the dark age of keyboards i was re awakened by razer, moved on to better products like a filco and now i type this on a beamspring it is age of quality boards, but if cherry have its way we would move into the time of ending.

[bhtooefr]

That Acorn linear membrane keyboard (used on the A3000, A3010, and A3020 IIRC - mine's on an A3020) is quite horrible in my opinion.

[andrewjoy]

i liked it the caps where at least nice and lets face it it was better than some of the alternatives

then again i am someone who thinks acer switches are nice they are just let down by the crappy flimsy case

[seebart]

my first was a C64, mitsumi I believe. Later I had a Amiga 1000. Then different Apple's at work. Only 2009 did I stumble over a AEK 2 and remembered.My first beamspring is on the way here[emoji1] .

[Muirium]

A lot of us grew up with mechs (or, very often, a mix of mechs and even worse shite than exists today, like that notorious Sinclair) and then went on to forget. Weird, eh? I always appreciated a new keyboard because it would be clean (hooray) and usually stylish. I even liked my Apple A1048 flytrap at first, before it picked up a gruesome look, and began to feel truly startlingly bad to type on. That was the experience that got me paying attention again to the feel of whatever I was typing on, besides purely the look of the thing and how portable it was. I think I recall Mr_A500 saying the same was true for him as well. They were remarkably miserable keyboards!

Meanwhile, Apple went and steered everyone to short throw laptop keyboards back in 2006 with the first MacBook. They replaced their (shite) desktop keyboards with a similar style not long later, and when I picked up a Bluetooth model for myself I wasn't that impressed. So here I am! But the same is most definitely not true for everybody. Indeed, we were talking about this just the other day. Plenty of otherwise discerning sorts seem to be quite proud of their laptop grade desktop keyboards. A parting of the ways.