complaining about $300 for a great keyboard is like complaining about a pricey bed. You use it for how many hours of the day if you're a programmer/engineer? Maybe it's worth spoiling yourself.
* Bed
* Office chair
* Keyboard and mouse
* Monitors
* Footwear
* Cooking basics like a couple of knives and a pan or two.
Perhaps this can explain it better than I will ever be able: https://wiki.lspace.org/mediawiki/Sam_Vimes_Theory_of_Econom...
"At the time of Men at Arms, Samuel Vimes earned thirty-eight dollars a month as a Captain of the Watch, plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots, the sort that would last years and years, cost fifty dollars. This was beyond his pocket and the most he could hope for was an affordable pair of boots costing ten dollars, which might with luck last a year or so before he would need to resort to makeshift cardboard insoles so as to prolong the moment of shelling out another ten dollars.
Therefore over a period of ten years, he might have paid out a hundred dollars on boots, twice as much as the man who could afford fifty dollars up front ten years before. And he would still have wet feet."
Perhaps a modernized/realistic version would be "you can spend $200 on pizza ten times in a year, or you can spend the same on a couple of knives and second-hand stainless steel pans. At the end of the year, you may have some excess body fat depending on activity level, or some good useful cookware" (or something, I dunno, I'm never going to be as smart or eloquent as Terry Pratchett GNU)
I'm not sure if there's a common mechanism by which things like that come to be. Possibly that they are designed for customers who are buying in bulk for use by other people (cubicle drones, PBI, buyers of assembled bikes), and who have a vested interest in reliability.
Unfortunately my life isn't stable enough to invest in something that I can't carry with me when I have to move. It's luxuries like these that I've often had to go without entirely (having a chair and desk is so nice compared to using a laptop on a mat on the floor). If immigration were easier, I'd have already settled down, but instead it's been 8 years and counting living like this. I really hope my pending resident visa application comes through this time, so I can start investing in things like those.
"spend money on things that go between you and the ground" aka tires, beds, chairs, footwear, cushions, etc.
This is just based on my top of the head ‘when does the cost exceed the cost of labor and materials’ estimate.
except it isn't a great keyboard when compared with standard keyboards, and its value proposition is absurd when taken into account that standard keyboards cost around 10€ and ergonomic keyboards by reference brands such as Microsoft go for about 50€.
One can easily spend more in coffee over a few months than it costs to buy one of these somewhat better keyboards.
Mine is still going strong after more than a decade.
Also, these 300 eur laptops are not something I'd consider for everyday work. Way underspecced for a lot of stuff, and generally miserable to work with or carry around.
It's an easy sell when the doctor says "you need this to avoid time off work" or similar. More developers should take a preventative approach and invest in ergonomic hardware.
(I'm pretty sure my desk is about $500, and the chair probably similar.)
My chair at home actually only cost $500 because it was the store's house brand, but it happened to be the most comfortable. If it weren't for that, I'd have bought an Aeron. A name-brand office chair lists for $1000-$1500, but avoiding a sick day or three due to back pain makes one very +EV, very quickly.
It's an expensive experiment, especially considering the vast variety of different styles, layouts, pressure sensitivity, etc, etc.
After that for about another decade, I bought a new keyboard each year, often anywhere from $20-50, and it was always disappointing... I'd put up with it for the better part of a year and move on. I'd tried several of the more popular mechanical keyboards, never quite the same.
I then found Unicomp was still making them... though not exactly the same, still really nice imho. I use one of the 103 key models at home. I've since switch to a cherry mx brown das keyboard at work to spare my coworkers the noise. In the end, the $120 or so I spent for a keyboard that's lasted me years is far better than one I've swapped out at least once a year.
I'd probably consider it if I had any signs of RSA or actually liked split keyboards at all. Ironically, moving to a mechanical keyboard with a tactile feel, the RSA symptoms I did have have since gone away. I've still tried several other KBs and styles since then, my only suggestion is stay away from mechanical keyboards under around $80 as they're often knockoff switches that are not as good and don't feel the same.
The Type M is the original IBM PC keyboard even better than the type F AT keyboards.
It's great, and what's not to love if you're a POSIX guy? The Ctrl and Caps Lock keys are swapped, so the Ctrl key is on the home row like God intended. It has buckling spring, positive keyclick action and it's so good if you do a lot of keyboard input or use Vim and/or Emacs. The bottom plate is steel and it's heavy, it won't slide around on my desk.
Sure, for custom mechanical keyboard snobs, the keycaps aren't anything to write home about because sometimes the key characters aren't properly centered on the key surface. But my keycaps look OK, maybe I just happened to get a good one. And it doesn't bother me anyway because I never look at the keys when typing.
https://www.hagstromelectronics.com/ke-xtusb-keyboard-encode...
I have built my bed frame from soda cans and wooden slats I found on the street
€60-80 buys a mass-produced ergonomic design, like the Microsoft Ergonomic. These aren't adjustable or programmable, but it's easily a worthwhile improvement.
(Personally, I bought a mechanical keyboard because I don't like the low-travel laptop-style keys that are now standard on the MS Ergonomic and other similar "cheap" ergonomic keyboards.)
€100-150 buys a mass-produced, adjustable, reprogrammable (to some extent) keyboard, like a Kinesis Freestyle. This will help people with wrist issues, and will seem an obvious improvement to anyone who has a Microsoft Ergonomic. It also comes with mechanical keyswitches, which give more options in typing pressure.
€300 buys a sculpted ergonomic keyboard, like the Kinesis Advantage2. I've never used them, but people who have had wrist problems seem to swear by them. They look comfortable to use, if you know how to touch-type in the standard way.
Within this whole range are DIY and small-scale ergonomic keyboards. The price varies a lot depending whether it's self-assembled, self-printed/cut, etc (this obviously makes no difference to the effectiveness of the keyboard), the type of key switches chosen (this makes some difference, but will eventually lead to the kind of discussions one hears about 99.999999999% copper speaker cables where people are spending €2+ per switch) and the key caps (which is 99% appearance).
All of them are fully programmable, and there's potentially a lot of customization possible for tilting, positioning and so on.
The key switches and key caps are independent from whether the keyboard is ergonomic or not, so you can also spend €300+ on an extremely un-ergonomic keyboard with just 50 keys, a milled aluminium case, 8° tilt, no feet, €2 switches and incorrect Japanese key legends with colours taken from a manga. This should be considered art rather than a useful tool.
Adding the €150 Japanese key caps to a €120 kit-built ergonomic keyboard doesn't make it worse, but mine looks good enough with the plain €15 key caps.