How good/bad is QWERTY? Seriously.
So in my previous write-up, while highlighting the benefits of alternative and custom layouts, I declared without much evidence that QWERTY is not that bad at all, and also that it is in the top 2% of all the possible layouts. Well, like so many times in life: it depends. I did my original research many years ago - the exact value was in fact 1.82% -, but I forgot to mention that this is only valid in a special case: using my personal corpus and ruleset. It makes sense since back in the day I did this to support the design process of my own custom keymaps. Anyway, it was high time to redo my original experiment, dive in this topic a bit deeper, and reveal the logic and method behind my calculations. Spoiler alert: I was wrong! Or was I? ;) QWERTY Everyone knows QWERTY I guess. Christopher Sholes, Remington 2 typewriter, preventing jamming of type bars, path dependence, whatever. I'm not going to cover it here, check this previous write-up of mine if you are interested...
Jul 1, 2024
Zealios were designed, teased, and sold all within a centrally located keyboard community. Back in the years between 2013 and 2016, Geekhack was the forum for custom mechanical keyboard switches. Sure, there were places like Deskthority, IRC relays, and even the barely yet sprouted r/mechanicalkeyboards subreddit that was diametrically opposed to all things “geekWHACK” according to its founder and owner at the time u/Ripster55, but the western community existed largely on Geekhack. If you wanted to talk about keyboards, become a seller or designer in the custom keyboard space, or even dip your toes in the still fairly new artisan keycap community at the time, it was done on the pages that are still there today. Flash forward to today and Geekhack is a hollow shell of its former self. That’s not saying that any of those other forums listed up there as well necessarily did much better. With the advent of Discord, Twitch, and TikTok as platforms and waning interest in the hobby by moderators and mass contributors like Daniel Beardsmore, iMav, and Ripster, the platforms that once propped up the community are dusty relics with its occupants scatted into the wind into thousands of tiny hyper niche keyboard spaces. Without a central keyboard space to truly bring everyone together, a singular product like this could almost certainly never grip hold of the entire custom keyboard community all at once ever again. Even if the largest keyboard company you can think of wanted to debut the next revolutionary product to move the hobby forward today, it will still fall on deaf ears to large swathes of the community that simply don’t interact with them day in and out. Reason 2:
Project Zealio pitched an entirely unproven product at a high price point and sold it almost entirely on the reputation of Zeal, the person, alone. As I teased earlier on in this article, way back in 2015 there simply was no such thing as community-made custom mechanical keyboard switches. There was no idea of what this would look like, how hard it would be to do, or even what the costs associated with such would be. Just the idea of convincing a large switch manufacturer who is almost entirely disconnected from the then quite small community to make a custom set of molds for a switch that would have no market capture outside of that small community seemed borderline impossible financially. And yet, Zealios switches sold like no other at a $0.75 per switch price point that would make most people turn away today. How Zeal managed to do this, though, was through his meticulously built reputation over the years. All the way back as early as February 21st of 2014, Zeal was making and selling custom keyboard cables before he even had a website. Gaining a massive reputation for his “buy today, ship tomorrow” service, he amassed enough of a following and trust in the community to roll that into an unlimited MOQ keyboard groupbuy in the Simply60 keyboard as well. Project Zealio in 2015 only came about after the built upon success of both of those previous endeavors, and I know for a fact that many people had faith in the quality of the project based on Zeal’s reputation and ability to execute, alone. In this day and age, singular people in the community simply can’t and don’t have the ability to build up such a reputation in such a centralized place with financial stakes as high as they are now. Even single keyboard groupbuys, these days, require the support and coordination of multiple vendors to happen safely and securely for all parties involved. The days of truly making a name for yourself in the keyboard community as an independent, single person entrepreneur is basically long gone.
Reason 3:
Project Zealio and Zealios switches were a then truly unique concept that had never been executed on before. While it’s certainly true that Zealios V1 switches are not technically unique insofar that they were designed around trying to mimic the tactility of existing “Ergo Clear” modder switches at the time – which were just Cherry MX Clears with lighter spring weights swapped in – just the premise of trying to make your own better version of a switch was unheard of. No individual or small company had ever struck a deal with a switch manufacturer as large as Gateron for something like this, and since the announcement of Project Zealio in 2015 only even a handful of people have ever done this in any similar capacity with a company this size at all. And I’m not just talking about ordering switches either – I’m talking about buying and paying for the ownership of an entire set of molds for switches that would be made at such a legacy manufacturer like Gateron. If someone were attempt to approach a switch manufacturer and develop a new switch from the ground up with new molds today in 2024, they wouldn’t be able to get anywhere without incredible (read >$100,000) worth of bankrolling from a large keyboard company or only working with the newest and least proven of switch manufacturers. Never mind the fact that the person would not have enough personality, nor enough attention of the keyboard community at large, to be able to convince them to pay $0.75 per switch for a switch that mimics that of another one. Today people are simply too jaded by and familiar with the idea of switches being designed to mimic the feeling, sound, or qualities of other already existing switches.
Normally I round out my articles here on Drop by trying to re-emphasize some of the prescriptive points I’ve worked into the paragraphs above this final one. While this normally does well with guides or short-lists that are meant to push as much new knowledge about switches into your minds as I can, this article was more of a personally motivated “horizon expander” than anything else. Knowing just how insane it was that Zealios switches even happened in the first place, I can’t help but laugh a little seeing how people react to switches and switch releases that are infinitely more safe, planned out, cheap, and innovative today than the original Project Zealio sale. Whether it’s by intentional ignorance or a complete lack of awareness, people simply don’t realize how good we have it now with switches, and they certainly don’t seem to understand why switches like Holy Pandas or Zealios are as important to the current state of the mechanical keyboard hobby as they truly are. Hopefully after reading this you too will carry around with you a bit more of an appreciation for Zealios switches and what they mean to us all here.