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Comment by ahelwer | Hacker News Reader

I do love the sculpt but they tend to die within a couple of years. I went through two of them before switching to something more durable. The build quality is just bad - many times my computer was behaving weirdly, traced to one of the function keys being stuck down (this also manifested as the keyboard eating new batteries within a couple of days).

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Logitech makes a very similar keyboard now and I love it (I had to return a sculpt because the g key would keep getting hung up on the shell).

https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B07ZWK2TQT

This is my exact thought. I love it, but I'm about to retire my second one. It's almost worth just paying the price for a new one every couple of years though. I have two of the older Microsoft Natural keyboards from decades ago that I periodically switch to and they will probably last another 20 years.

I've got two MS Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000s in my cupboard. I'm currently on a Sculpt, but much preferred the 4000s. Unfortunately I uncovered their weakness - humidity.

I work from home with evaporative cooling over summer.

The first unit lasted a few years, but died on a humid summer day. Next one only lasted 12 months, again dying on a humid summer day.

First unit is irrecoverably dead. The second would come back to life after pulling it apart and cleaning with isopropyl alcohol, then die again a few days later (during summer). Issue is that the humidity seems to short the key matrix. If not careful it makes for some awkward typing mistakes.

The Sculpt seems a bit more resilient to humidity.

Yes, the MS Naturals absolutely dissolve when exposed to water. I've destroyed at least a half-dozen over my lifetime by spilling small amounts of water on them. Only takes one drop to destroy some keys. Just after I finished high school, in the mid-2000s, I stocked up and bought four of them. Two of them have been wrecked since then, but the other two are still going strong. Still haven't seen a keyboard that I want to replace them with, but at some point, these will give up the ghost and I'll have to find something new to try.

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