Episode Transcript
This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.
Kaylee: Each of these are all linear switches, but this one has the deepest sound, my cat keyboard.
Morgan Sung: This is Kaylee, a mechanical keyboard builder and content creator who also goes by Sad Girl Types. She’s showing me one of her favorite builds, a cat-themed keyboard complete with a fuzzy calico cover.
Kaylee: It has fur on it, so you can pet it. It is the color of a calico cat, and all of the keycaps are also calico colored. Yeah, that’s it. It’s a cat keyboard.
Morgan Sung: I recently spent my Saturday afternoon wandering around a crowded convention hall ballroom, tapping and typing on so many keyboards that I lost count.
[Typing sounds]
Morgan Sung: This was Keeb Life, an annual meetup for custom mechanical keyboard enthusiasts. On the edges of the ballroom, vendors sold unique keycaps and switches and other keyboard accessories. In the center of the room were rows and rows of folding tables, where attendees showed off their own custom builds. Each keyboard was accompanied by a card labeled with the builder’s Discord username and the details of their keyboard, literally down to each individual part. The cards also noted whether attendees were allowed to touch and pick up the keyboard. Each board was unique, and I tried almost all of them.
In case you haven’t noticed, Close All Tabs has a running bit about mechanical keyboards. At the end of each episode, we credit the keyboards that we use whenever we open a new tab.
[Morgan in clips from previous episodes]
This episode’s keyboard sounds were submitted by Alex Tran and recorded on his white EpoMaker High 75 keyboard….white and blue Epo-Maker Aula F99 keyboard…Gateron Milky Yellow Pro V2 switches.
Morgan Sung: We have fun here. The mechanical keyboard hobby took off in the mainstream fairly recently. From the satisfying ASMR typing videos to lull you to sleep, to the enviable color-coordinated custom builds all over Instagram, to the endless budget keyboard reviews that flood your For You page, mechanical keyboards are the content gift that keeps on giving.
We’ve been in a Keeb renaissance between the content and the sheer amount of affordable keyboard products on the market. But the mechanical keyboard market is changing, which means the whole hobby is changing.
Today, we’re jumping into the world of mechanical keyboards. Where did this hobby come from? Why are people so into it anyway? And what’s up with the tariffs? Buckle up.
This is Close All Tabs. I’m Morgan Sung, tech journalist and your chronically online friend, here to open as many browser tabs as it takes to help you understand how the digital world affects our real lives. Let’s get into it.
You know how this goes. Let’s open a new tab.
[Typing sounds]
How to build a mechanical keyboard.
Frank Lee: Hi, my name is Wonho Frank Lee and I love custom mechanical keyboards.
Morgan Sung: My friend Frank often jokes that his photography career funds his mechanical keyboard hobby. He’s designed and built dozens of keyboards for his friends, for his fellow enthusiasts that he met online, and of course, for himself.
Frank Lee: I’m ashamed to say this, but I have over 30 keyboards. So it’s not just about…
Morgan Sung: I only have four, so…
[Laughter]
Frank Lee: Hey, Four is great! People talk about, like, why are we spending so much money on the keyboard? And I just usually tell them, like how much of your day do you really sit in front of the computer and use your keyboard? Like how much time are you actually typing? Do you think you spend more time on your keyboard or in your car? If you’re going to spend a lot of time on it, might as well make it fun.
[Music]
Morgan Sung: Frank also organizes KeebLife, the annual mechanical keyboard meetup I went to. And the rest of the year, he streams his builds on Twitch and runs Keeblife’s Discord server. His fellow enthusiasts have been called keebeheads, mechies, keebers, typebeasts, mechheads, keyaboos, and many, many more names. No matter what they’re called, this hobby is very community oriented. People turn to each other for advice, reviews, and to go in on group buys. Those are like mini Kickstarters for small batches of products. People pay up front, and sometimes it can take more than six months of manufacturing and shipping before they receive it. But for a lot of Keebheads, the exclusivity of getting a limited edition small batch keyboard makes the wait worth it.
There’s also the big keyboard subreddit, r/MechanicalKeyboards, with more than 1.3 million members. And then more niche ones, like r/keebgirlies, r/BudgetKeebs, and the myriad of mechanical keyboard subreddits for specific countries.
Frank, for one, got into it in 2020 through a friend who is also a keyboard builder.
Frank Lee: He was really into custom keyboards. He was getting into it too at the time. I kind of scoffed at it, like, why would you want to spend so much money on a keyboard? Like, I got a keyboard that works, that’s fine. But as I was part of his Discord server, and he was just always talking about keyboards with other people, I was like, ooh, okay, that kind of cool. Maybe I’ll get something.
Morgan Sung: He bought a very basic secondhand keyboard. Nothing special, but he customized it with some cheap knockoff Star Wars themed keycaps. The friend who introduced him to keyboards helped him add a few other custom parts. And that’s when Frank got really into it.
Frank Lee: Seeing how he built it, how he soldered everything, it really got me like, excited. I’m like, oh my god, that’s kind of cool. The whole process of it was more exciting than the keyboard itself at one point. And as someone who loves Lego, uh, there was like a, oh wow, this is another level. Like, you can put things together. You just feel very accomplished afterwards.
Morgan Sung: Mechanical keyboards are known for their onomatopoeia labels, like the very popular creamy boards.
[Typing sounds]
The deeper, reverberating thocky.
[Typing sounds]
The bright, bouncy poppy.
[Typing sounds]
And even lighter, staccato clicky.
[Typing sounds]
And the loud, ostentatious clacky.
[Typing sounds]
If they all sounded the same to you, you might just not be deep enough into the hobby yet. But Frank fell in love with the idea of chasing these sounds. He had a small following on Twitch from building Legos on stream during quarantine. So when Frank built his first ever mechanical keyboard from scratch, he did it over the course of a four hour live stream.
Frank Lee: So I was also getting a lot of help from the community members who were in the chat too. But once I was done, when I was doing the typing on stream, man…felt good.
Morgan Sung: Since then, Frank has built countless custom mechanical keyboards and he gave me a quick keyboard 101. There are a lot of components in a keyboard, all of which can affect the final sound and feel of the board. But let’s hit the highlights.
[Music]
Let’s start with the size: full boards have 104 keys, including a number pad on the side. But most people don’t use that, so they opt for smaller sizes. 75% boards are especially popular since they drop the number pad and a few other lesser used keys.
Frank Lee: The benefit of this is you get more desk space. Now, why is that important? Well, gamers like to move their mouse quite a lot. And the keyboard layout gets even smaller than that.
Morgan Sung: There’s a 60% board which drops the arrow keys. Then they get smaller and even more compact. Sometimes to the point of absurdity.
Frank Lee: I’ve even seen like 10%, which is almost a joke. But some people kind of use it as a challenge, which is also kind of a fun thing.
Morgan Sung: Keycaps are usually the first thing you notice about a keyboard. A lot of the builder’s personality shines through the keycaps, like the color combinations they use. The keycap profile or the way that it’s shaped and angled toward the typer also affects how comfortable the board is to use. At the heart of the board are the switches, the mechanical, spring-loaded part that tells your computer that you just pressed a key. The most popular ones are called linear. They’re smooth and ideal for really fast typing. Tactile switches require some more force to press, but a lot of people find that feedback satisfying. Then there’s Frank’s favorite: clicky.
Frank Lee: Here we go. I’m going to click it for you guys.
[Typing sounds]
Morgan Sung: Like higher pitch.
Frank Lee: It clicks higher pitch. And the difference between this switch and, for example, the MX Blue is MX Blue only clicks when you press it down. This one clicks both way up and down.
[Clicking sounds]
[Music]
Morgan Sung: So how did this hobby get so big in the first place? That’s a new tab, but we’ll save opening that for after this break.
Morgan Sung: So when did mechanical keyboards become such a thing? Time for a new tab. [Typing sounds] The golden age of keyboard content.
The mechanical keyboard hobby would not be as popular as it is today without YouTube. So to guide us through this part of the deep dive is a YouTuber who has a lot of keyboards.
Hipyo Tech: I’m Hipyo Tech. I am a keyboard content creator and general tech creator, YouTuber, whatever you want to call it. I’ve spent the last five years making videos and making custom keyboards and teaching the whole entire world how they could get into this crazy weird niche of a hobby.
Morgan Sung: OK, so I am going to ask you a bit of a personal question, so I hope you’re ready. How many keyboards do you have?
Hipyo Tech: [Laughs] Dang! Um, right now? Probably about 200.
Morgan Sung: [Laughs] Oh my God!
Hipyo Tech: But that’s because like at the end of last year, I got rid of about 80. So…
Morgan Sung: So this is you paring down?
Hipyo Tech: Yeah, this is me pretty paired down, but usually five to six keyboards end up at my door. Like you can see there’s a pile of keyboards behind me in my video. These just arrived this week. And yeah, it’s it’s almost a nightmare, but really cool.
Morgan Sung: Building and modifying mechanical keyboards was once a relatively niche hobby. In the 1990s tech companies had phased out mechanical keyboards and rolled out cheaper, sleeker versions. Those had a squishy rubber dome under each key instead of springs.
The original key heads sought to recreate the experience of using vintage keyboards. By the early 2000s, mechanical keyboard parts hit the markets and enthusiasts got really into experimenting with different materials to optimize the sound. Then in the 2010s, gaming companies rolled out pre-built mechanical keyboards, which were designed for more satisfying tactile feedback while furiously gaming. Keyboard hobbyists started going in on group buys together. Mechanical keyboards gained popularity as people flocked to blogs and then reddit to trade notes. Creators built a steady audience on YouTube and Twitch, where they documented their custom builds. Typing ASMR became a thriving genre of content. But it was pricey.
Back then, all the parts needed for a custom mechanical keyboard, from the circuitry to the switches, could cost around $600. And that didn’t even include the labor costs involved in putting it together. The hobby wasn’t exactly mainstream until five years ago. And then it blew up.
[TaehaTypes in Clip]
This is the typing test of Tfue’s multi-thousand dollar keyboard. [Typing]
Morgan Sung: In January 2020, YouTuber TaehaTypes streams the process of building a custom luxury mechanical keyboard for Tfue, a Fortnite streamer. The keyboard was housed in an iridescent aluminum and stainless steel frame that flashed fuchsia and cerulean and electric purple.
In the stream, Taeha donned a delicate set of cloth gloves to unbox the casing from the manufacturer’s packaging. He meticulously lubed components with a thin paintbrush. Then with tranquil jazz playing in the background, he pulled out slender, angled tweezers and talked viewers through the process of preparing the circuit board.
[TaehaTypes in Clip]
I’m going across the PCB and I am essentially closing the loop between the switch.
Morgan Sung: Watching the precision involved in building the board was mesmerizing. And then Taeha posted an ASMR video featuring him typing on the board.
[Typing Sounds]
A lot of people had never heard anything like it. Frank Lee, who we heard from earlier, said that was the moment that mechanical keyboards went mainstream. And Hipyo pointed out that Taeha’s glitzy keyboard introduced a whole new audience to the hobby.
Hipyo Tech: He was the spark where it was like, he had started to get big at the perfect point to just pull everybody into the hobby. He was almost everybody’s like, first, like, oh, whoa, keyboards are cool kind of moment.
Morgan Sung: Betty Van, another keyboard YouTuber who runs a channel, Switch and Click, also pointed to that same moment in internet history
Betty Van: With the Fortnite players learning about that keyboard and then 60% keyboards becoming more popular with gamers, too like that started this big thing of like keyboards for gamers. But also people started working from home, so keyboards for office people. It’s like two groups at once that it’s just really big. It’s like an explosion.
Morgan Sung: And here’s Hipyo again.
Hipyo Tech: Suddenly, everybody was like, wait, you can have a keyboard that sounds good, started funneling into the hobby, which kind of boosted up all of these burgeoning creators who are just kind of into this weird niche and making videos. So 2021, there was tons of creators that got the YouTube algorithm rocket, we were all making videos together. It was insane.
Morgan Sung: It seems like when you first got into it in 2020, a lot of the hobby was more about tinkering, customizing, and it seems now a lot more of it is like collecting. Was it always that way or is it, is that relatively new?
Hipyo Tech: It’s kind of shifted a little bit more consumer-y, which is kind of a bummer because the tinkering was the funnest aspect of it.
Morgan Sung: Manufacturers in China noticed the uptick in mechanical keyboard interest and started to produce pre-built keyboards designed and assembled en masse in-house. So instead of spending upwards of $700 on custom parts to build their own, buyers could now grab a decent one off the shelf for $200. All they had to do was plug it in. Here’s Frank again.
Frank Lee: That movement really changed everything since then, in my opinion. The custom keyboard hobby that I knew and I got into has shrunk quite a bit in a sense because of so many keyboards that are coming in now.
Morgan Sung: And Hippio said this shift also affected the kind of content people want to watch. When he started out on YouTube in 2020, his videos ranged from in-depth switch reviews to building keyboards with wacky modifications.
[Hipyo Tech in clip]
We’re filling this bad boy with some Play-Doh, which I don’t necessarily recommend, but I felt like doing it. So here we are.
Morgan Sung: But now, people aren’t as interested in building a keyboard from scratch.
Hipyo Tech: What made keyboards so interesting as a hobby is that they were fundamentally flawed. Like, people hadn’t quite figured out how to make the aluminum cases not sound really pingy and terrible, or they hadn’t figured out factory lubrication on switches that made them feel really smooth and buttery. So you kind of had to do all that stuff yourself, where it’s like people had figured out, hey, if I take this switch apart and I spend four hours lubing a whole batch of switches, my keyboard will sound and feel better. That was like a really great way to get you in like engaging in the hobby and tinkering with like, oh, maybe this lube will feel different. Or maybe if I swap this spring out, my switch will feel differently. And most of that’s been solved now at like, the production level, where you could buy a keyboard for 100 bucks nowadays that would give you a better experience than a keyboard that might have cost you 400 bucks back in 2020. It’s like, it’s almost solved in a weird way.
Morgan Sung: Yeah. I mean, obviously, the tinkering aspect is a huge part of your content and also your creator origin story. How do you feel about that part of the hobby becoming less popular?
Hipyo Tech: It’s really bittersweet. Like, I mean, you spend five years screaming at brands to make better keyboards and you’re tinkering with keyboards to make them better. And then suddenly they’re all listening, which means that you don’t need to tinker with keyboards. It like, it’s everything that I was asking for brands are now doing like, even Asus and Razer and Corsair, like all of these huge gaming brands where I’m like talking to their teams behind the scenes. You guys, if you literally just got one machine that could lubricate your switches, they’d be so much better. And they’re like, oh, no, it’s not, there’s no demand. And suddenly they’re doing it now. It’s like, wait, I hurt myself. Like, there’s still people out there that are really passionately modding keyboards. But for the vast majority of people now, there’s like almost no point. So it’s really bittersweet.
Morgan Sung: Betty has actually shifted the content of her channel entirely. One of the main reasons is this dip in custom keyboard popularity. She still makes keyboard videos, but the videos that do well are typically reviews of pre-built budget keyboards.
Betty Van: Like economically, there’s been less views on just specific keyboard content. Like before, if some company released a keyboard and we talked about it, it would get more views and more people would buy it or there’d be more interest in the product. But nowadays, I think everyone already has a good enough keyboard that they’re not necessarily interested in looking for their next upgrade.
Morgan Sung: But, there’s another factor that complicates just about everything in the hobby. It’s another reason Betty’s team has switched to more general tech content. Tariffs. One more tab.
[Typing sounds]
What is de minimis?
[Music]
Back in April, following what President Trump dubbed Liberation Day, all imports into the US were slapped with a minimum 10% tariff. It’s been months of back and forth with other countries of retaliatory fees and tenuous deals and debates over the legality of all of this. But throughout it all, there was still the de minimis exemption. That’s a special rule, which said that shipments valued under a certain amount could enter the US without tariffs or much oversight. Until recently, that threshold was $800. But that rule ended August 29th of this year, which means that buying anything from abroad just got a lot more expensive. And it’s consumers and business owners taking the hit. Because of the uncertainty, many companies paused all shipping to the U.S.
At KeebLife, I talked to a keyboard enthusiast who goes by Jazzzster.
Jazzzster: I was actually visiting China recently. I actually asked the person that was designing the board…I was like, can I pick up this keyboard, since I’m here? I know that you’re not shipping it out to people in the US, but can you help me have the keyboard now?[Laughs]
Morgan Sung: Wait, so you bought, you like preordered it in the U.S. and then…
Jazzzster: And then I was, like, I think it’s going to be done being manufactured about right now, right? I’m luckily here at the same time. Can I pick it up?
Morgan Sung: The keyboard brand Osume also suspended U.S. orders in February. The company is based in Canada and warned customers that existing shipments could be hit with an additional 10 to 35 percent tariff.
Clement Cheung: It was basically almost impossible to have our products delivered from Canada to the States.
Morgan Sung: That’s Clement Cheung, Osume’s revenue analyst. In August, the company opened a special U.S. based warehouse and resumed shipping to American customers. The caveat? They had to raise prices. A keyboard that used to be $170 is now $220. Although the U.S. Warehouse has worked out so far, Clement said moving manufacturing from China to the U.S. just to avoid tariffs would be very unrealistic.
Clement Cheung: China has years of experience building and manufacturing keycaps in a really specific environment. And that environment changes everything about a keyboard: the sound, the quality, as well as the longevity. Compared to if we were to do it in the States, to replicate that consistency and quality is very difficult.
[Music]
Morgan Sung: Newbies, custom DIYers, and the vast majority of mechanical keyboard enthusiasts still rely on products made in China. Now, it’s further complicated by the end of de minimis. Those extra fees can make a reasonably priced purchase suddenly unaffordable. Some consumers have paid more in tariffs than what they paid for the item itself. It’s really affecting independent designers, like Frank, who designed a custom keyboard as a passion project. He sourced a vendor in China to help with manufacturing all the parts, set up a group buy, and found a few other enthusiasts to go in on it. The tariff announcement came in just before they started production.
Frank Lee: For some people, $300 for this particular keyboard sounded really good value. But if they end up having to pay 400 bucks, it’s not really a good value anymore. So who takes the hit in that case, you know? And in a smaller group buy, like me, where I literally have just over 100 units sold, that impact is even bigger. Because I wasn’t doing this to make money to begin with. If I get hit with this, I don’t have a lot of buffer to pay for it.
Morgan Sung: Some small batch keyboards don’t even make it to the market, or they’re hit with long delays, like one brand that Betty recently tried to work with.
Betty Van: There was this one moment where we were going to cover a keyboard that was going to launch on Kickstarter. And the brand had told us, like, this is going to release on this date. So we scheduled our video like, right before the date that it would launch. But it didn’t launch because the tariffs were announced and they were like, we’re going to push back the launch. But we released the video anyways, and that video didn’t do as well, mostly because, well, no one could buy the keyboard, for one. So it was like a really unquestionable time in this space. So like there’s been internal discussions on our team about like, hey, we need to branch out. Like we need to experiment with our content to find something else that’s going to hit.
Morgan Sung: Hipyo said these unpredictable extra fees have been devastating for the hobby, which was built on group buys and supporting other enthusiasts’ creativity.
Hipyo Tech: The de minimis exemption allowed a lot of these small brands to start up. You could buy a keyboard. It would ship to you. No import tariffs. So great! What a novel idea. And now I’ve heard from, I talked to a couple big companies that I worked with before, like, this interview, just to see, like, how is this affecting you guys? It was way worse than I thought.
Morgan Sung: How so?
Hipyo Tech: Like, they’re having so many customers just deny packages and return packages because the customer doesn’t know what tariffs they’re going to be paying. The brand doesn’t how much in tariffs the customers are going to be paying. There’s some people getting hit with a $150 tariffs on a $100 keyboard order. Like that…that doesn’t make any sense!
Morgan Sung: Yeah. How is it affecting creators like yourself specifically?
Hipyo Tech: For me this year, like I’ve had many, many sponsors tell me, like, hey, we just don’t have the budget for videos anymore because we had to spend all of our budget on paying import taxes to start up U.S. Warehouses because a lot of these companies are like ‘we have to start a U. S. Warehouse because nobody’s going to buy our products and pay these tariffs.’ And there’s so many unknowns floating around.
But on top of that, I mean, I personally paid, I think over three thousand dollars in tariffs this year …
Morgan Sung: What?
Hipyo Tech: …just from brands sending me unsolicited keyboards. [Laughs] I don’t know it’s coming, but then I get hit with, ‘oh, hey, DHL says you have to pay $150 to get this keyboard’…
Morgan Sung: What?
Hipyo Tech: and they’re like declaring real…yeah. So for me it’s I mean, it’s business expense, whatever. But yeah, it it’s real. It’s very real.
Morgan Sung: I mean, with the current economic climate, with a state of tariffs, like with what consumers are looking for now, like, is that affecting your content and the kind of videos you’re making?
Hipyo Tech: Yeah, well, I mean, I can tell you from my personal experience, like, if I make a video on a keyboard that’s more than $100, way less interest than if it’s a budget focused keyboard, because in general, consumers are just feeling really, really strained right now. And that’s ignoring tariffs. Like, that’s just focusing on stuff from Amazon because in general, now somebody doesn’t want to buy a keyboard from China if it means that they’re going to get hit with these tariffs. Yeah.
Morgan Sung: Wow.
Hipyo Tech: Yeah, it’s truly a nightmare for so many small businesses. Like, it’s insane. It’s made it so small businesses can’t experiment very much because you have to just really play it safe. Like we used to experiment by having a ton of different key cap sets and a ton of different desk mats, and it didn’t matter as much what did great because like, everything kept the boat floating. But when the stakes are like so much higher now, it’s reducing innovation. It’s adding so much more uncertainty. And like there’s been a couple other keyboard companies that are like, ‘we might just pull out like we might just stop making keyboards.’
Morgan Sung: Wow.
Hipyo Tech: I can’t say those brands. [Laughs]
Morgan Sung: Because everything is moving toward pre-built and all that and like, there’s less incentive to innovate. Do you think people will go back to that kind of mentality of tinkering and of customizing because the companies aren’t willing to take risks anymore?
Hipyo Tech: I really hope so. Like, I hope it’s kind of cyclical where it’s like people will go back to just like, having a little bit less options and kind of enjoying the craft of it more because building keyboards is still so fun. And the idea of customizing a tool that you use every day is so fulfilling. But like, when all of the economic forces are kind of making you buy a pre-built keyboard, it’s, you don’t really have a choice. So I really do hope that it moves that way.
[Music]
Morgan Sung: In the custom keyboard world, people are always searching for their endgame: the keyboard that’s so perfect, so tailored to their specific preferences that they’ll never have to buy or build another keyboard again. It’s a constant process of trial and error and experimenting with different modifications. A lot of hobbyists have put that endgame hunt on hold thanks to the tariffs and uncertainty of trade relations. Frank, for one, is over the idea of chasing an endgame. For now, he’s finding joy in the collection that he already has.
Frank Lee: The beauty of custom is that you can have so many different kinds of things, not just one thing that you just like. And I love that. So I have a bunch of different layouts, different colors and keycaps. I have different switches and typing feels on all my keyboards. I have a rotation. I go through every day, I kind of change up, that’s like, one of my rituals. Like before I get to my computer, I bring out another keyboard. Oh, yeah, I feel like using this. There’s really no endgame for me. I would say my goal is to always have a collection that I am very happy with. And I’m kind of happy with that right now. Yeah.
Morgan Sung: Whether your keeb is a luxury custom build or a pre-built budget find, let’s close all these tabs.
[Music]
Close All Tabs is a production of KQED studios and is reported and hosted by me, Morgan Sung. This episode was produced by Chris Egusa and edited by Chris Hambrick. Close All Tabs producer is Maya Cueva. Chris Egusa is our senior editor. Additional editing by Chris Hambrick and Jen Chien, who is KQED’s director of podcasts. Original music, including our theme song and credits, by Chris Egusa. Sound design by Chris Egusa, additional music by APM, audio engineering by Brendan Willard and Brian Douglas. Audience engagement support from Maha Sanad. Katie Sprenger is our podcast operations manager and Ethan Toven-Lindsey is our editor in chief.
Some members of the KQED podcast team are represented by the Screen Actors Guild, American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, San Francisco, Northern California local. Keyboard sounds in this episode were submitted by Frank Lee, including his Geonwerks F1-K Bingsu Edition, DNworks Ryujin and HHHH Salamander PC keyboards.
And I know it’s a podcast cliche, but it would really help us out if you could rate and review us on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to the show. Thanks for listening.
