I'm with Indy, what a way to charge a fortune for a keyboard! mine cost £8 - mouse came with it too, both work perfectly.

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But they cheat because the centering ridges for the "f" and "j" keys are still on the board.

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I thought those were supposed to make g33ks keep on task at work and not dream about girls - fiddle with the keyboard nipples and have a smutty smirk.

manufacture costs on most retail products are usually a quarter of the standard retail price, ergo if costs 19.99 to but it probly cost under a fiver to make. the extra comes from the distribution chain putting their mark-ups on, hence why it's cheaper to buy direct if you can.

how do i know? well, I know what stuff costs in the computer trade, and also I was an industrial product designer, and I invariably had to work to a cost/retail ratio of 1:4. and ease of manufacture is greatly aided by simplicity of form which is why so many electronic goods now are very simple shapes.

these uber keyboards are more expensive not because theyre that much more complicated to make but because they have more parts and more assembly operations. even automated production has increasing costs for more operations, plus as quality control has to be higher, tooling tolerances are more stringent, production is slower, and there's probly been more effort put into the packaging. Even so, i agree that prices in the hundreds for a keyboard probly do not reflect what it cost to make - i can't see a keyboard costing $50 to manufacture, can you? so there must be a large element of perceived value - *designer* peripherals as it were, a la S+arck mice by Philippe Starck, or Macs.

Another option is to learn how to type on an old Davorak style keyboard (it's a different key layout). That'd confuse them. Many moons ago, when I was a young lad and the idea of a megabyte of ram was a glint in the milkmans eye, I remember learning to type on a Davorak and it turned out I was quicker on a Davorak than a Qwerty. What made it all the more harder to learn though was that my actual keyboard was a Qwerty, so I had to memorise from diagrams where all the keys were. Confusing.

Freeworlds Mod Developer
Author of Modular Station

'There is no Good nor Evil in the universe, just perceptions and circumstances.'

http://www.artlebedev.com/portfolio/optimus/
Optimus keyboard

Here's the site, go look for yourself.

If you all think it is a fake, never to be made, then maybe we should make it.

Yes, no?

"This is Liberty hall, you can spit on the mat and call the cat a bastard." Commodore John Grimes, Rim Worlds Naval Reserve

i never said it was a fake. it's a pre-production mock-up, a model. they're designers, they don't make anything.

I just think Das Keyboard started off as a shipment of goofed up keyboards.
They arrived without any lettering and some braniac came up with the idea of
selling them as uber geek keyboards.

The first lot of them, I bet, were dead cheap because they probably got the manufacturer to rebate some of the cost due to the "goof."

dude, i know you're new, so i'll say it nicely. please don't gravedig posts as old as this, unless you're posting a relevant followup/high priority question - also, 5+ posts in old threads in one day is enough - stop spamming TLR please