• They/Them

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it's kind of amazing how long cheapo membrane keyboards and optical mice last. I work at an electronics recycler - we get hundreds of keyboards and mice in every week. all kinds.

the Gaming™ peripherals and mechanical keyboards that we get are 50/50 between broken and working. I suspect that this is at least in part because the people who shell out for this stuff aren't so eager to throw it away while it still works, but that ratio still isn't great.

wireless peripherals fare better. when we actually have the receivers and can test them, they work about 75% of the time. I suspect that the common point of failure is the transmitter, since the ones that do actually connect never have broken keys.

but the cheap, office supply special, bulk rate keyboards and mice? I don't know why we even bother testing these. even the crummiest feeling keyboards and the cheapest mice have a failure rate of something like one tenth of one percent. it's incredible. I have seen one broken mouse and two broken keyboards of this class the whole time I've worked here. shit, at home I've been using the same cheapo Dell membrane keyboard for about ten years now. still works perfectly. I've never even cleaned it. I should probably do that.

so why do they last so long? seriously, why? it doesn't make sense. planned obsolescence is the norm in the tech industry. these things are usually sold in bulk, to people who don't really care how good they are, and used by people who don't much care either. they're already replaced constantly even when they still work. why build them so durable? can the engineers at Logitech/Dell/HP/Lenovo just... not figure out which corners to cut?

I'm certainly not complaining. but damn if I'm not confused.


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in reply to @MxSelfDestruct's post:

I found my current generic dell keyboard 6 years ago in a box on the side of the road with about 50 others. It was soaked in rain. I tested half of them before deciding yeah, they all still worked.

I gave the rest of them to a guy who needed them for his mobile rescue/emergency relief org. Think u-haul trailers filled with equipment they haul to places hit by hurricanes and such, for emergency internet access and logistics and communication.

He said he came to get them specifically because they were the cheap dell ones that "outlive most of us unless we smash them to pieces"

Seriously the cheap dell mouse and keyboard I got from goodwill has outlasted any gaming brand I've ever bought. It's weird but tbh it's nice not having to buy new peripherals/tinker with them to get them working again.