i just bought a steelseries apex pro keyboard almost sight unseen. i saw it at the store, read the blurb on the box, typed on the not-yet-clapped-out demo model, and bought it on the spot.
this was primarily because all the letter keys use hall effect switches - solid state sensors that detect the proximity of a magnet attached to the keystem. i don't know that this matters, esp. since i'm really not much of a Gamer; i don't really give a shit that my csgo k/d ratio might increase by .05%. no, i just think it's neat to have something that's new.1
i mean, if i'm honest, it's just the new old thing - hall effect keyboards predate the modern concept of a keyswitch. they were commonplace in 1960s (!) desktop calculators, persisted through some 1970s terminals, and then eventually got displaced by the far more complicated, failure-prone, louder, and most likely cheaper switches from the vaunted Cherry corporation.
this is really just a return to something that we already identified as a potentially ideal way to make a keyboard before any of us was born, then abandoned for cost savings, and are only returning to now because we saturated the market so heavily that nobody could figure out how to undercut sixletter sludge from china unless they got off their asses and made something fresh, buying the Big Brands another six months reprieve before this gets cloned by FRZLETS and JoySong for 1/3 the price. what else is new.
well, what is new is that, while those 60s/70s keyboards just used the hall effect switch to detect whether the key was up or down, this actually reports the position of the key as an analog value to the driver. i'm not sure that this can be used to accomplish much - in theory, you could implement analog keyboard movement in games with this: gently push on the W to walk, press further to run. in practice, I doubt that is either forthcoming or practical, nor do I think I would use it, because i have never and will never walk in a videogame unless it's a fantasy RPG i can get lost in, and those come out once a decade.
there are however two driver features that legitimately leverage this capability and would otherwise be impossible, to which i have to give credit:
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variable actuation point. if you think the keys are too light or heavy, you can just move where the trigger point is in software.
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a new rapid fire feature which dynamically adjusts the actuation point. if you press a key past the trigger, you don't have to let off all the way before you can reactuate it. as soon as you let off at all, it considers any further downward movement to be a new press, allowing much shorter stroking on rapid represses. 2
do i think these things really matter? not at all. maybe for some high level apex player, but probably not. probably not for anyone. it's most likely just baseball mud or football face paint - folderol that doesn't actually help anyone, and even if it did, would help so minimally that you wouldn't notice it unless you're already a worldwide top 100 player, who don't need special keyboards or mud or facepaint to win anyway, and frequently lose even with them.
the only reason i care is just because it's an actual innovation, a thing i couldn't buy five years ago, and as i have lamented before, it is my feeling that industry is essentially over, consumer electronics are dead, and there is nothing left to invent that is likely to be invented in my lifetime. feels good when i'm wrong, even in a tiny way.
Footnotes:
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i'm sure this is not a steelseries exclusive feature, and for all i know it's already being cloned everywhere, but the only way to enjoy life anymore is to pretend that what's in front of me is all that exists
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technically, it will now be possible to beat watch for rolling rocks with one half A-press
