Comment by gnicholas
3 years ago
There's a company (Matias?) that makes one-handed keyboards. When I bought one on a lark, 20 years ago, it was maybe $80. I checked back years later and they were $600, and had all sorts of marketing materials about disability accommodations qualification. My guess is that they realized that there was a way to get their product purchased by HR departments, and that such purchasers would be very cost-insensitive. So they 7x'd their price.
They were at least one of the patent owners. One of many things that soured me on the company (the rest being a series of more mainstream keyboards which deteriorated to become unusable, the last one I broke to bits when I finally gave up on it). And yeah when I had my accident it was north of $500 for the half QWERTY model, which was more than my rent at the time. The rest of their keyboards were retailing around $150.