deskthority

What is “big”?

From 1960–1990, most keyboards had discrete “mechanical” switches, because they were competing with typewriters, and the main purpose of a computer was “word processing”. By the early 1990s, there were millions of “mechanical” keyboards being produced every year. Computers marketed to professionals still needed to have high-quality keyboards or they would be avoided.

Early rubber dome switches were not particularly cheap, and their selling point was the lack of sound. These were popular for use in open offices, etc.

At some point, computer vendors figured out that customers cared more about price and CPU speed than they cared about keyboards, and figured out that they could produce very cheap rubber dome keyboards consisting of a couple pieces of mylar with some metal contacts on them, one rubber sheet, a couple pieces of injection molded plastic frame, and a pile of injection molded plastic keycaps which popped into the frame, and thereby dramatically cut their assembly costs.

Mainstream as far as companies like Corsair making mechanical keyboards. It's hard to argue that mechs are way more popular now, seeing as Cherry had stock issues getting enough switches produced.

The “mechanical keyboard” market today is a tiny fraction of what it was in 1990.

The typical “mainstream” keyboard from the late 80s / early 90s would cost $300+ in today’s dollars, adjusted for inflation. Such prices are not the mainstream today, but only supportable for a few niche products.

On the other hand, the “looks like a transformer robot with lots of blinky lights gamer peripheral” market is bigger than ever, if that’s what you were talking about.

Alps makes a lot of money selling electronic components in all kinds of high-margin markets (automotive, industrial equipment, etc.). Nobody there is wishing they had spent 20 years losing money chasing the consumer keyboard switch market.

I can see your point, but the same switches go into both professional boards and gamer-crap boards.

What sort of surprises me is how much interest there's been in the MX-alike switches for the new "gamer" and "low end" mech boards. While Gateron has gotten a good rep on their own, a lot of the other brands (Kailh in its various flavours, for example) are still seen as lower quality goods. I'd expect that makes it harder to sell those boards to "low-information" purchasers who have just heard "Cherry MX is a good mechanical switch".

If they wanted a cheaper alternative, and were willing to ditch the Cherry name, there are a galaxy of other switch options out there. In such a situation, you'd think ALPS-type switches would be a good choice. The PCB changes are pretty small (probably no more complex than the plumbing to support RGB LEDs), and if they have any experience or tooling from from old vintage-era ALPS work, they can just start with it.

Ironically, it seems like most of the places we saw ALPS switches in "new" boards aren't in that situation-- they're from brands too new to have any vintage ALPS assets to reuse (Ducky's Xiang Min based boards, and KBParadise's Matias switch boards).