How Buying a Mechanical Keyboard Nearly Broke Me

When I sleep, I intermittently hold my breath. As a kid, my sister gave me a hard time about it because we shared a room, and the sounds I made, a drawn-out moan followed by a sharp gasp, kept her up. In my 20s, with no medical advice whatsoever, I decided that I could improve my nighttime breathing by practicing conscious breathing in my waking hours. I’d do it by swimming, I thought. So I bought goggles, a swim cap, and a membership to the local pool. It was foolish, and it didn’t work, although at least it was good exercise. I think back now about whether my motivation was led not by a need for quieter sleep but rather by the force of American consumerism that says if only we buy the right things, our problems will be solved.

The same foolishness led me to buy a $200 mechanical keyboard. And I regret it.

The hype around mechanical keyboards drew me in, but the choice to buy one came from my desire to stop taking my stress out on my keyboard. As a writer, I type all day, every day, and I have a tendency to aggressively pound at the board, my fingers stiff with tension. The keys on a mechanical keyboard, however, register at a mere half press, so maybe I could learn to type with more gentleness and an attitude of self-care. The switches clack with a meditative rhythm that perhaps I’d find calming. A hefty base, typical in higher-end keyboards, would root it in place, so no more putting up with the off-kilter rocking I get from my current wireless keyboard. 

Buying a mechanical keyboard came with the promise that my work life would improve. We dream of a better life, and so we buy a product.

(Credit: Keychron)

Why Is It So Hard to Learn About Mechanical Keyboards?

Researching mechanical keyboards proved much more challenging than I had imagined. Sure, it’s a slightly niche interest, but with the rise in popularity of mechanical keyboards(Opens in a new window) in the last three or four years, I thought clear advice and guidance would be easy to come by. It wasn’t.

Plenty of buying guides point you to the best off-the-shelf mechanical keyboards. And on the other end of the spectrum are enthusiasts who run sound tests of different switches before filming a time-lapse of themself soldering their custom-made boards. But I needed more rudimentary information. I still needed to know what a switch even is. (It’s a spring-loaded doohickey underneath the keycap that essentially transfers the press of a key to a physical connection on the electronic board beneath it, which then becomes a signal to your computer indicating which key was pressed. It took me two hours of reading to understand that.) The gulf between buying a ready-made keyboard and building my own felt enormous and devoid of useful tips. Surely there must be something in between.

As I watched YouTube videos of people discussing “the hobby” (that’s how mechanical keyboard enthusiasts refer to what they do), I pieced together some of the basics, but I rarely learned something clearly in one go. I figured out, for example, that I didn’t want a “group buy,” which is when a company sells a mechanical keyboard kit but doesn’t fulfill orders until a threshold of buyers has put down their credit cards. I also determined that building a custom keyboard was out of my league, seeing as I don’t own a soldering iron and haven’t used one since ninth-grade metal shop.

The Hot-Swappable Middle Ground

A colleague tipped me off to the term “hot-swappable.” Hot-swappable refers to a mechanical keyboard that comes fully assembled, but can be disassembled should you want to change out the switches, keycaps, or other basic parts. It sounded more like my speed.

Another selling point of hot-swappable keyboards is that they’re often as beautiful and high quality as custom-built ones. It’s just that someone else has done the work of selecting the aesthetically pleasing parts and putting them together.

I ended up looking at boards by Keychron, though I still had to decide which size I’d like (70% fit the bill), which switches I wanted (the models I liked used Gateron G Pros instead of the coveted Cherry brand I had heard so much about on YouTube), and how premium I wanted the parts to be (a steel or titanium plate was a must).

I settled on a Keychron Q7 QMK Custom Mechanical Keyboard, fully assembled, in the Navy Blue B configuration ($179 plus $20 shipping).

(Credit: Jill Duffy)

At-Home Testing

I bought the board direct from Keychron, waited for it to reach me from Hong Kong, and a few weeks later, eagerly opened the package. Taking my new purchase out of the box, the base had real heft to it. The keys responded to my touch with gentle resistance. Even the USB cord was designed to match the look. It also comes with a set of tools if you want to switch out any parts.

My excitement waned when I read the little accompanying pamphlet that explained I first had to run a test to make sure all the keys worked. Simple enough. I set up, downloaded the test software, and worked my way across the keys from left to right. Everything was working fine until I hit the right side of the board, where four keys clustered together were dead.

I did everything recommended: removed the keycaps, checked the switches, and swapped the switches for ones that had worked on other keys. That’s when I understood why the tools were included.

I wrote to the support team and asked for help. Someone replied that I should “flash” the board and included instructions for how to do it. It involved pressing a physical button to do a factory reset and then pressing another button in a connected app to reset the firmware as well. I did. Nothing changed. I wrote back. Because of time zones, every back-and-forth added a new day to my dilemma. A few days went by when, at the support team’s request, I recorded a video of myself proving that the keyboard was in fact not functioning and that I had tried all the possible solutions.

“Do a factory reset,” they said.

I did. No dice. It had been more than a week.

“You need a new PCB,” they said. I wrote back to ask if putting in a new PCB is easy. If not, I’d rather the company just send me a working keyboard. “Oh yeah, here’s a video showing how to swap the PCB,” they replied. It required taking the whole keyboard apart.

Didn’t I buy a hot-swappable keyboard specifically to avoid building a keyboard? I wanted to shout aloud in protest, “No disassemble(Opens in a new window)!”

But I swallowed my fears and said sure, send me a PCB, whatever that is.

Assembly Required!

After another delay of waiting for shipping, a package thick with bubble wrap reached me—the new PCB. I rewatched the video showing how to disassemble the keyboard, cleared my desk, brought a few trays to my workspace so that I had a safe place to hold all the tiny screws, and began the project.

(Credit: Jill Duffy)

The video started with a board that had no keycaps or switches, and I wasn’t sure if I needed to remove mine. Thirty minutes in, it sunk in that I did. I carefully removed each keycap and switch and finally removed the old PCB and put in the new one. Then I began the reassembly.

(Credit: Jill Duffy)

Reinserting the screws was a slow and delicate process. Then one screw didn’t align perfectly. It sank below its hole, an omen of more bad things to come. I removed it, tried again, and got the same result. “Soldier on,” I told myself.

An hour into the project, I was replacing the switches, which was going fine until I got to the right side of the board, where one switch just wasn’t snapping into place. More troubleshooting followed by another complete disassembly to recheck what might have gone wrong.

It wasn’t the wonky screw, as I had thought, but rather a misalignment in the board itself that blocked the back end of the switch from becoming flush. Had it been a few millimeters different, all would have been fine. I tried everything I could to fix it and then called it a day.

(Credit: Jill Duffy)

After that, I took pictures of the defect and wrote another email to the support team saying I wanted my money back, please. I was done.

The Refund

Keychron was kind enough to take back the keyboard and refund me the cost of the product, though, in all, I lost about $40 on shipping, three months of my time, and any real hope that custom or hot-swappable mechanical keyboards are worth buying.

Unless you plan to go all in on “the hobby,” I can’t recommend buying a hot-swappable or custom mechanical keyboard. Stick with one of the best ready-made keyboards, mechanical or not. In my case, I put in an unexpected amount of work and only came out the other end feeling deflated and with less money in my pocket. Thinking back on all the videos I watched, I can anticipate other problems, like switches needing lubrication, soldering joints becoming unsoldered, or the tiny and delicate prongs of the switches bending or snapping off. It’s a lot of work for a product that probably won’t make me type with more compassion or ease the stress out of my fingers anyway.

Maybe I had an unusually bad experience, but given the fact that even learning about mechanical keyboards wasn’t straightforward, I don’t have much faith that buying another one would be any better. Perhaps the real lesson for me is the reminder that buying a product doesn’t necessarily improve anything about our lives. Why did I convince myself that a different keyboard would reduce my stress? It won’t.

In the same vein, I got a referral from my doctor a few weeks ago to finally get a proper sleep study done.