Comment by WesolyKubeczek
17 hours ago
My Endura Pro started having issues three months in after arriving to me in 2013; I remember how it was $99 and shipping was $98, and then I had to pay VAT on it.
It died quite quickly after and become parts donor for old IBM Model Ms I bought out from people’s attics. It was a wonderfully repair-unfriendly thing, too.
I love Unicomp and fully support their goal of keeping these switches alive, but I had a similar experience. The controller on the keyboard died after about a year. Meanwhile all of my 30+ year old IBM Model M's continue to work flawlessly.
This was the same time, around 2013, so I like to hope things have improved since then. I know they did switch the controllers they use in the intervening years and they also replaced the original IBM tooling for the other parts of the keyboard, so hopefully things are in better shape now.
Contrariwise, my unicomp model M has been going strong as a daily driver for at least 18 years. They may have lowered the quality more recently, and I'd recommend something in the cherry mx brown ballpark over it perhaps.
Many people swear by Unicomp, but I had that bad luck that I first paid for the thing, got the thing, and then read that as of recently, there had been problems. Problems with quality, problems with output. Then they went so quiet people thought they had gone out of business, then they resurfaced. By that time, I've had an original Model M and two different OG Model Fs. When I buy old stuff from eBay, at least I have my expectations calibrated to the fact that this shit is real old.
Your unit must have been a couple years older than mine, so it just might be of that more legendary quality. Yours is from at least 2008, right? You may even had got it before markets went bonkers!
Yeah I believe it's a 2006 model shipped in May 2007