Comment by reaperducer
6 months ago
Matias Sculpted keyboard… Although it was a decent effort, their overall build quality is pretty cheap, and it's not good enough to recommend
I concur. I thought I'd save a few bucks by buying the Matias keyboard that looks like the Apple Magic Keyboard with Numeric Keypad. After all, there are thousands of people on the internet who swear that Apple's prices are disconnected from build quality. It turns out the chattering masses online are wrong.
The Matias keyboard lasted all of a year. I ended up replacing it with the real deal from Apple, which is still going strong six years later.
More often than online "experts" would have you believe, you really do get what you pay for.
I think Matias is sort of notorious for stuff that looks good in theory, but is plagued by reliability issues they just can't seem to sort out. I didn't know it was possible to mess up a scissor switch keyboard, but apparently Matias found a way to do so.
They've also been trying for 10 years to make a 60% keyboard (see the infamous thread on geekhack). Granted they do seem to refund anyone who wants it, but it's hard to understand why on earth a keyboard would take 10 years to develop.
They're really good at identifying niche products and designing things to fit the target market, but not so good on actually manufacturing them.
> I didn't know it was possible to mess up a scissor switch keyboard, but apparently Matias found a way to do so.
That indeed does seem to be the sentiment, and seems true, but to be fair, Apple also botched their laptop keyboards to the point of class action for years. But the current Macbook Pro keyboard seems fine so far.
Apple was using a novel butterfly keyboard mechanism instead of standard scissor switches during that era. The M1+ MBPs went back to scissor switches.
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Ya I agree. Manufacturing is hard, but Apple has it generally locked in. Apple's greatest weakness has always been ergonomics. Their mice are built well, but they're little more than art projects in terms of usability. Their external scissor switch keyboards (I hated their older keyboards) have always been quite good for what they are, and if they made one in the shape of the sculpt, I'd try it. The magic trackpad is amazing, but I just find myself never reaching for it compared to my mx master 3
Maybe I got lucky - my Matias Quiet Pro has been fine (though I did have to replace one failing switch >10 years in) since ~2013 - possibly earlier, but at least since 2013.
Maybe, or they did. The switches on my Matias Sculpted only detract from the design imo. They feel crunchy and don't align well with their cutouts. I'm fully willing to believe that their reputation comes from not investing heavily in reducing the variability in their manufacturing process. Once a viable but far from imperfect product gets shipped, they might stop improving it, idk tho.