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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

"With Sonder all your settings are saved automatically to the cloud."

Just what we need. Computer peripherals slaved to some external cloud server. You have a computer right there, able to store stuff. Run programs, even. You don't want to be tied to some here-today, gone-tomorrow service. Also, how do you know it isn't sending your keystrokes somewhere?

An API would make more sense. Programs which change the meaning of keys as you change mode should be able to change the keyboard. Think Blender, with 10 pages of keyboard cheat sheet.

Also, it says "Pre-order. Available Q4 2016." Well, it's Q4 2016. Is it shipping?

How do they send power over "braided fiber"? Whatever that is.

As a hardware device, it may be perfectly reasonable. Ship the product, get some popular programs with too many function keys to talk to it, get the price below $100, lose the ego trip over how cool you are, and dump the "cloud" thing.

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Great feedback Animats, the cloud is something mostly editors had requested where they move from studio to studio, it's an option to simply download the their specific work flow to that terminal; it's optional; it's just a stored profile a user can elect to download to the keyboards flash. It's not like an IoT product logging keys; instead we have an API on the client which communicates with stored mappings on flash.

In regards to the fibre cabre, that's PR speak for a non cheap cable. Thanks again for the feedback; it's great to hear from other engineers etc.

Is there any chance you could bring price down to $99 to $120 range?

Get it manufactured in China, Do some business investment magic, economy of scale things. I dont know :D It is really cool keyboard, but price is above of what most people are willing to pay for a keyboard.

By the way, another use-case is using it with games with complex controls like Elite Dangerous, Star Citizen, Kerbal Space Program.

Your comment seems too hand-wavy for the parent commenter to take seriously.

First, they're partnered with Foxconn so it's very likely they're made in China.

Second, you can't just "do economies of scale" without a slightly pricier v1 of the product; hey're not going to be selling hundreds of thousands of them.

Third, many are more than willing to to pay over that amount for keyboard.

Just take a look at custom mechanical keyboards (Ergodox, Poker 3, k95 if you're looking at more mainstream ones) if you want a glimpse at the high-end keyboard market. I'm guessing that the "patented crisp, responsive key mechanism" are not mechanical switches, but people do (as do I) pay well over that for keyboards they're interested in.

Great response, answered it for me already.

The MOQ is 300k units; we're at economies of scale but it's still a new technology. You're right on the made in China, Suzhou, Shenzhen etc. Bingo also on the third point.

You already can't use your Razor mouse(not to the fullest, anyway) without signing in with your Razor account. And recently, Nvidia started requiring that you create an Nvidia account to use their GeForce Experience application. Super annoying.

I thought I'd had to sign up for some kind of account to upgrade my graphics drivers a couple of weeks back but I'd convinced myself it was just a bad dream... Agreed it is indeed annoying - not to mention that the GeForce Experience "optimal" settings nearly always seem to be far from optimal on my hardware.

Yeah, I downloaded it to get "optimal" settings to play Titanfall 2 on my GTX750Ti, and GeForce Experience just told me that my GPU doesn't match the minimum requirements and it can't help me. So I ran the game, it selected default settings for me(mixture of low and medium) and it runs perfectly fine, at 60fps. Really great help GF Experience there, really fine.

Yeah, I went ahead and installed the driver manually (sans GeForce Experience). I can always update manually when needed (if/when a new game is wonky).

Screw having to create unnecessary accounts (or signing into services I don't absolutely need).

I wish that "cloud", for many applications, would mean "You can tell us where to save the file and if it happens to be your Dropbox folder it will do the expected thing."

The syncing random data across computers thing is a solved problem. There are different solutions that meet different needs - some people may have their data stored on a company file server, some like to use Dropbox, some are happy with iCloud Drive, some use OwnCloud or Box.net or any number of other things.

Instead of developing cloud services to sync stuff, manufacturers should just let you pick where to save the settings and let some other sync mechanism do the job.

I thought there was a relevant xkcd for this but I can't find it. Something about too many cloud services or something. Basically like "we'll save it to the cloud!" then someone going "which one?!

I think braided fiber means that the usb cable has one of those nice cloth cable covers that come on nice headphones, instead of just a plain plastic casing.

Hilarious. New tech with pun marketing. Precious. I think I enjoyed the pun more than the product. I agree that not every thing needs a cloud behind it. Why couldn't it just store the bits to it self? Shock! Then I wouldn't have to spent ten or twenty extra minutes making sure it could connect to some damn server to update itself or change a simple function. Pass. Cool concept.

It's also stored on the on board flash, the cloud is an option to download a user profile stored online to a new keyboard. It's an optional feature that editors expect, if we didn't include it we wouldn't be addressing a key market want from a different demographic.

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