deskthority

Hi all

Just curious about the rarity of the Cherry G81-3100SPG
I have one in 'new unused' condition, what do these typically sell for?

Thanks!

they are pretty damn rare, I've in fact never seen one. Do you have pictures ?

Myoth wrote: 05 Apr 2021, 22:42 they are pretty damn rare, I've in fact never seen one. Do you have pictures ?

Just uploaded pics.

fucking poggers

What that mean?

Anyway, nice caps board! I'm sure its caps, it, I'm sure it will go to a good drawer home!

what kind of keycaps are those?

There's someone on eBay selling a G81-3000LAMGB for £56.99 which may give a rough esitmate, but depending on the rarity, it's anyone's guess. https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Cherry-Keybo ... Swv4pf~OV6

The letter tells you. The eBay one is L: lousy lasered. You can see how weak its legends are in the pics.

This one is S: superb dyesub. A whole different league of caps.

wiki/Cherry_article_numbers

The keyboards are comparable. But no one’s buying for those. It’s all the caps!

Muirium wrote: 06 Apr 2021, 21:33 The letter tells you. The eBay one is L: lousy lasered. You can see how weak its legends are in the pics.

This one is S: superb dyesub. A whole different league of caps.

wiki/Cherry_article_numbers

The keyboards are comparable. But no one’s buying for those. It’s all the caps!

I forgot retro Cherry caps are well sought after

Certainly more so than keyboards with Cherry MY switches!

Cherry dye subs are about as good as it gets. I prefer them even to doubleshot SA. They’re up there with Topre caps.

Folks, you all talk as if it were a matter of the keycaps.
The keyboard as such is a rare item, the more so as it seems to have had very little use ("'new unused' condition"), shows no yellowing, and has its box and even its manual.

But well, nowadays people butcher unique vintage keyboards for the switches,
so in the end those keycaps may well find themselves on one of those ridiculous DIY keyboards their owners are so proud to show off.

Rare? It’s a 3000! Even I took my Cherry dyesubs off an older board than that. (It remains in box, because fundamentally I have the same, unhelpful feelings as you do! I’ll never do anything with it. It’s just a portrait, hidden out of view, of my caps!)

kbdfr wrote: 07 Apr 2021, 11:00 Folks, you all talk as if it were a matter of the keycaps.
The keyboard as such is a rare item, the more so as it seems to have had very little use ("'new unused' condition"), shows no yellowing, and has its box and even its manual.

But well, nowadays people butcher unique vintage keyboards for the switches,
so in the end those keycaps may well find themselves on one of those ridiculous DIY keyboards their owners are so proud to show off.

Spoiler:

You always can count on me for a good rant

heeeey it is cherry so the value must be defined by either the switches, if vint black, or the caps, or both. /s

Vintage blacks? The switches aren't even MX, you know. They are this abomination. More or less Cherry telling you they're a caps display case, not to be pressed!

Muirium wrote: 07 Apr 2021, 11:35 […]The switches […] are this abomination. More or less Cherry telling you they're a caps display case, not to be pressed!

Even if I do agree with you, be aware that this is a terribly elitist point of view.
Most professional typists have no problem typing on MY switches.

Which reminds me of this older post:

kbdfr wrote: 04 Jun 2018, 17:03

Chyros wrote:

ccl wrote: It's a real pity they (G81/MY Switches) never fail, because NOBODY would miss them...

They are fucking horrible. It's debatable whether they work to begin with :p .

Circle-jerking seems to be a popular exercise

The (white) Cherry MY switches are horrible, but they are in general use nearly everywhere, and nobody complains except for those who know better. Most people are so used to them that they just wouldn’t know what this fuss is all about.

As an analogy:
Back in the (distant) days, my brother bought a record player with a built-in loudspeaker - I mean, one loudspeaker, so mono of course. He told me he did not bother buying one of those (then) new stereo devices because mono or stereo, he simply did hear no difference. […]

Celebrating ignorance? You're entirely right that by far most people care nothing for their typing and how their keyboards feel. That's how we wound up here: in the world where the thinnest, lousiest, cheapest, downright cynical keyboards won to be ubiquitous. You've got to go out of your way to type on anything nice. You have to join a "scene" and venture on your own wee voyage of discovery just to get to type on something less than heinous. What a triumph for despair.

Keyboards are the one part of computers that evolved for the worst. Only cost saving really mattered. Why? Because users' ignorance. Because manufacturers contempt for their "consumers." Because in the end, only weirdos give a shit about typing!

The only ones with an honest reason to celebrate this are the beancounters saving all those precious tenths of pennies in manufacturing costs. If only consumers could be convinced of screens they can hardly see and processors which can hardly keep up. Think of the backwards progress we could make across the board!

Muirium wrote: 07 Apr 2021, 12:14 Celebrating ignorance? You're entirely right that by far most people care nothing for their typing and how their keyboards feel. That's how we wound up here: in the world where the thinnest, lousiest, cheapest, downright cynical keyboards won to be ubiquitous. You've got to go out of your way to type on anything nice. You have to join a "scene" and venture on your own wee voyage of discovery just to get to type on something less than heinous. What a triumph for despair.

Keyboards are the one part of computers that evolved for the worst. Only cost saving really mattered. Why? Because users' ignorance. Because manufacturers contempt for their "consumers." Because in the end, only weirdos give a shit about typing!

The only ones with an honest reason to celebrate this are the beancounters saving all those precious tenths of pennies in manufacturing costs. If only consumers could be convinced of screens they can hardly see and processors which can hardly keep up. Think of the backwards progress we could make across the board!

You may be right, but isn’t your contempt for the "ignorants" exactly what I called "elitist"?
If consumers would certainly reject "screens they can hardly see and processors which can hardly keep up" but they can cope with what we find to be lousy keyboards, I would say that they are normal and we are over-sensitive.
My favourite professional co-typist has been using an MY Cherry keyboard for years, finds my MX keyboard feels somehow better but not that much that she would feel she needs to switch.

New production mechanical keyboards probably haven't been this available since the early 90s, especially at the prices we're seeing.

Generally things have seriously improved in the past ten years. Largely due to the resurgence in PC gaming, but in no small part because while people in this hobby might complain loudly, they put their money were their mouth is.

This is a beautiful board, but MY switches are my least favorite cost savings measure Cherry employed to avoid bankruptcy. I'd prefer a Dell Quietkey or even a Microsoft wave keyboard over MY switches. They have the durability rating for commercial applications, but they feel worse than a laptop keyboard.

Aye, it's definitely better now than it was in 2000-2010. Those were the bad days! Cost-cutting had reached its end state, but the fightback was yet to take off. These days you've so much more choice, if you care. Which most people don't, but enough of us do.


@Kbdfr

I've no contempt or even criticism for your colleague who finds Cherry MY perfectly up to her workload. She's just as entitled to her subjective experience as any of us!

It's just a shame keyboards in particular are so subjective, because that makes them prime for cost cutting; that most objective thing of all! Everyone can tell that screens have gotten consistently better through the years and storage and processors too. (Well, those not made by Intel more so!) People aren't so forgiving when you dial any of those things back. But the average keyboard today is mince compared to the average keyboard of the 1980s. And that's because consumers don't notice, so manufacturers don't have to try.

It's on us, in the end. Manufacturers are just being coldly rational.

Muirium wrote: 07 Apr 2021, 11:35 Vintage blacks? The switches aren't even MX, you know. They are this abomination. More or less Cherry telling you they're a caps display case, not to be pressed!

Of course i know, I wasn’t talking about the specific board in this topic. That was toward how cherry keyboards are normally appraised among modern crowd

Muirium wrote: 07 Apr 2021, 13:25[…] It's just a shame keyboards in particular are so subjective, because that makes them prime for cost cutting; that most objective thing of all! Everyone can tell that screens have gotten consistently better through the years and storage and processors too. (Well, those not made by Intel more so!) People aren't so forgiving when you dial any of those things back. But the average keyboard today is mince compared to the average keyboard of the 1980s. And that's because consumers don't notice, so manufacturers don't have to try. […]

I do not agree. Keyboards have become much better in one respect: their price.
When burglars stole my G80-2100 decades ago, the insurance paid for a new one, IIRC it was something like 500 DM (equivalent to today’s ~700+ EUR). The price for a new G81-8308 (successor of the G80-2100, with improved capabilities but MY instead of MX switches), is somewhere around 200 EUR today - less than a third.
So for people who are not so sensitive to the typing feeling as we are, that’s a huge improvement.

Like my favourite co-typist feels no need for better switches, I feel no need for gold-plated metal parts in my guitars.
And I am quite certain there is a dedicated Internet forum where I am called an ignorant

I disagree with your claimed disagreement: we agree entirely on the matter of price! It is just a matter of which of us finds this cheapened state of affairs to be disagreeable.

Monitors used to cost a lot more, too. My 24 inch 4K Dell was just a few hundred £, already many years ago. While the 21 inch CRT I bought back in 2000 was similarly more expensive, yet objectively inferior in every possible way, as well. Laptops too. Everything has gotten cheaper with Chinese manufacture and globalised supply chains (even if it's not made in China, it must compete with what is!) Yet keyboards alone are still in spite it all: worse.

Muirium wrote: 07 Apr 2021, 15:24[…] Yet keyboards alone are still in spite it all: worse.

Worse? What can be worse than a keyboard deliberately made to reproduce the noise of a typewriter and so badly designed that it internally breaks even if not in use?

My point exactly! The Model M was an egregious downgrade, cost-cutting on an earlier downgrade from the Selectric styled beamspring! And yet users let IBM get away with it.

The history of keyboard de-evolution is a nightmare to behold!

Muirium wrote: 07 Apr 2021, 11:08 Rare? It’s a 3000!

but it's not ?.. as petty as it is, we're working hard at making the differences between Cherry boards more obvious to people, it would be a shame to talk down all the 3xxx as merely "3000s".

Muirium wrote: 07 Apr 2021, 15:45 My point exactly! The Model M was an egregious downgrade, cost-cutting on an earlier downgrade from the Selectric styled beamspring! And yet users let IBM get away with it.

Users at the time did not see it as a downgrade I'm sure, what we call a downgrade today is only the result of us being able to take a step back and look at the timeline in its entirety. Manufacturers might push for cost-cutting measures, but the latter are unmarketable if they don't hold some kind of advantage over the previous model. It's quite the nitpicking but there are many many "downgrades" we see today that were happily bought by customers. And you can't blame them.



As for my opinion on Cherry MY (you didn't ask ? you still get it), New-In-Box MY keyboards are not as bad asyou might expect, truly. They're not worth a good MX Black, but they're far from being the bottom of the barrel. It's almost as if keyboard switches depended on their condition and that it would be simply pointless to review (and compare) keyboards (and switches) in different states ... now if only someone could take the hint, at least for anything that isn't Alps

Muirium wrote: 07 Apr 2021, 15:45 My point exactly! The Model M was an egregious . […]

Oh, I thought you were disparaging just Cherry,
like people nowadays do while continuing to drool (and pay ridiculous prices) for anything IBM.

But well, this academic discussion may not be of great interest for the thread opener.
While I would have wanted his keyboard for my collection a few years ago, I don’t even have a suggestion what it would be worth.
Except that if he wants anything less than a three-digit figure, I would consider beefing up my colleciton again

In other words: put it on eBay with good photos (also showing the box and its label), set a reasonable starting price (I would say ~150 EUR if you would be OK with it selling for that price), be careful that your options include international shipping (otherwise it would not even appear on foreign eBay sites), choose a long bidding period, and wait what happens.

Myoth wrote: 07 Apr 2021, 16:02[…] now if only someone could take the hint, at least for anything that isn't Alps

This board is really nice and someone will pay stupid money for it. I am stupid but I don't have enough money. An ebay auction is a safe bet but you could also try selling on mechmarket to avoid ebay drama and fees.

Muirium wrote: 07 Apr 2021, 15:24 I disagree with your claimed disagreement: we agree entirely on the matter of price! It is just a matter of which of us finds this cheapened state of affairs to be disagreeable.

Monitors used to cost a lot more, too. My 24 inch 4K Dell was just a few hundred £, already many years ago. While the 21 inch CRT I bought back in 2000 was similarly more expensive, yet objectively inferior in every possible way, as well. Laptops too. Everything has gotten cheaper with Chinese manufacture and globalised supply chains (even if it's not made in China, it must compete with what is!) Yet keyboards alone are still in spite it all: worse.

To be fair China also manufactures most of the best keyboards being made today. The majority of CNCed customs and the new model F are only economical because of machine shops in China. The fact that a modern aluminum custom keyboard (one of say 100 made in a groupbuy) costs less than a F122 cost new (without adjusting for inflation?) is simply insane.

The only reason Chinese factories make junk is because companies pay them to. The commodification of the computer was the real killer.

Keyboards did not get worse. They changed roles. If you took a damn soda into the mainframe room in 1977 you'd have got your ass as kicked as twelve nerds could kick it. Now keyboards advertise being spill proof as a standard. Back then some switches were so unreliable even the smallest bit of grit would kill them, leading to the oh-so-lovely keyboard condoms that everything wore. Hell, just being slightly dirty is enough to dumpster the price of an Alps board. Dome over membrane? Sheeit, you basically have to put effort into making them stop working. More likely the electronics fail than the switch.

Then there's the fact that practically every keyboard, everywhere, speaks the same language. If it's USB you plug it in and it works. Brilliant.

But it's an asinine comparison regardless. If you want Model F quality you can still buy it and you will absolutely pay the premium for it, just as you did then. But who the hell wants to spend $1,000 on a keyboard when you can buy a $50 Logitech that will last you forever and use the remaining $950 on a down payment on an RTX card?

micmil wrote: 08 Apr 2021, 01:19 Keyboards did not get worse. They changed roles. If you took a damn soda into the mainframe room in 1977 you'd have got your ass as kicked as twelve nerds could kick it. Now keyboards advertise being spill proof as a standard. Back then some switches were so unreliable even the smallest bit of grit would kill them, leading to the oh-so-lovely keyboard condoms that everything wore. Hell, just being slightly dirty is enough to dumpster the price of an Alps board. Dome over membrane? Sheeit, you basically have to put effort into making them stop working. More likely the electronics fail than the switch.

Then there's the fact that practically every keyboard, everywhere, speaks the same language. If it's USB you plug it in and it works. Brilliant.

But it's an asinine comparison regardless. If you want Model F quality you can still buy it and you will absolutely pay the premium for it, just as you did then. But who the hell wants to spend $1,000 on a keyboard when you can buy a $50 Logitech that will last you forever and use the remaining $950 on a down payment on an RTX card?

I'd posit that a Model F has similar spill resistance to modern rubberdomes, and the larger bezel makes it harder for drinks to spill on it

You're right though, I can buy a $50-75 off brand mechanical keyboard on Amazon which is remarkably solid (NKRO, backlighting, metal backplate, Gateron switches) or I can literally buy a new Model F for $400 (less than IBM was charging those banks back in the day with or without inflation). Both boards will (probably) survive years of use assuming there are no defects.

The custom MX build is the real rip off. Something like a $400 case + $120 keycaps + $60 in switches + $20 stabilizers.

Rayndalf wrote: 08 Apr 2021, 02:27 I'd posit that a Model F has similar spill resistance to modern rubberdomes, and the larger bezel makes it harder for drinks to spill on it

You're right though, I can buy a $50-75 off brand mechanical keyboard on Amazon which is remarkably solid (NKRO, backlighting, metal backplate, Gateron switches) or I can literally buy a new Model F for $400 (less than IBM was charging those banks back in the day with or without inflation). Both boards will (probably) survive years of use assuming there are no defects.

The custom MX build is the real rip off. Something like a $400 case + $120 keycaps + $60 in switches + $20 stabilizers.

How many ass-tier rubber dome boards have been sitting on the counter of the same car dealership service area since 1992 because the owner was too cheap to spring for the $15 upgrade when they updated from AS400 five years ago?