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They are also not very honest about "Cherry copied our backlighting idea" - all the MX I ever saw have a hole for a 3mm LED, and I'm sure I saw other vendors selling backlit keyboards with MX switches even if Cherry itself was late to this game. I think it's all retarded, and it's not very innovative by itself to replace blue diodes or whatever with multicolor diodes. Whatever will sell to kids eh?

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They were not talking about through-hole LEDs in that section as Alps styles switches (Matias is resurrection of the simplified Alps style) cannot have both a through-hole LED and have a tactile or click leaf. They are talking about how Matias used a transparent switch housing along with SMD RGB LEDs which allow the light to shine through.

Cherry has been around for decades, far longer than the idea of backlit keyboards existed. Obviously at some point that became a thing so they would have added the hole.

Before the backlit keyboards became a thing, the hole was meant for a lamp to shine through a window in the keycap, like caps lock.

The first Alps keyboard (Zenith SuperSport) I had actually had a lamp and window on the caps lock key!

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