Why the Amazon Basics Keyboard Is My Favorite Keyboard

You said:

> 6+ hours and hundreds of comments later I went through the comments and I still haven’t seen anyone post a single mechanical keyboard that matches my requirements at any price point.

I was just offering one keyboard which does as far as I can tell satisfy all of your requirements. (The previous $250 version of this keyboard is about the same as this $350 one; the differences aren’t IMO worth the difference in price. You could probably find a used one for $150, if not less.)

Here are some of the features that make the Topre board nicer than your Amazon board:

– The actuation point is about halfway through the stroke instead of at the very bottom, meaning you don’t need to mash the key all the way down to get it to reliably actuate. Once you get used to this you can type with much lighter and springier finger movements, and (a) dramatically reduce the amount of shock on your finger joints, reducing both fatigue and long-term damage, while (b) improving your typing speed.

– Having taller keycaps on the further-away rows of keys compared to the home row makes them easier to reach by extending the distal joints of the fingers instead of moving the hand. It is in my opinion inexcusable for keyboards not intended for laptops to be flat across the top. Additionally, the keycaps have a curved top shape which helps the fingers find them.

– The switches have what many people find to be a more pleasant tactile response (this is subjective, and I prefer other keyboards, but those do not satisfy your other criteria). I would expect the 45g Topre keys to need less force than the Amazon board, but I haven’t ever seen measurements of that one. (Some people prefer heavier switches; Topre also makes a 55g version. Some people prefer very light switches; Topre also makes a 30g version.)

– In particular they have a nice bit of bounce on the upstroke which will help your finger to release the key just by relaxing the flexors instead of needing to fire your finger extensors. This will (a) reduce fatigue, and (b) improve speed and accuracy.

– The Topre keyboard is likely more uniform from key to key. Most <$20 rubber dome boards have poor quality control. (I have not tried the Amazon one.) It should also retain its key feel better over time.

– I would expect the Topre “silent” board to be quieter than the Amazon board, but I haven’t spent much time with either one, so you’d have to test that yourself. Personally I like much louder keyboards.

– The Topre keyboard is much more robust; the switches use capacitive sensing to tell when the spring has been depressed, instead of relying on an electrical contact, so they should not wear out even after tens of millions of keypresses.

– The Topre keyboard has larger rubber pads on the bottom, probably made from a nicer material. It should slip less than the Amazon board (being heavier also helps with this). It also has nice sturdy feet if you want to adjust the tilt.

– The switches are very stable and smooth, with tighter tolerances. The keyboard is much more rigid and solid feeling. Overall it feels like a well engineered product instead of a flimsy toy. Many people find joy in using well made long lasting tools, but YMMV.

– The keycaps are made of a sturdier type of plastic, and use dye sublimation printing. The letters will never wear off, and even the surface texture should remain through decades of serious typing.

– The electrical components inside the keyboard are more expensive and less likely to fail. You’d have to test latency, etc. for yourself, I haven’t extensively evaluated either of these keyboards.

– The keyboard supports full n-key rollover (this is unlikely to matter for routine typing).

> how is your recommended keyboard different than a run of a mill $50 mechanical keyboard

The switches feel substantially different. The keycaps are made from a different type of plastic. The case is sturdier. The switching mechanism is more reliable.

But keyboard preferences are subjective. Personally I like many $50 keyboards better than this $350 one. I was just looking to satisfy your criteria.

I don’t think those are fair comparisons but if you did buy my course, thanks for the support (it really helps).

Now for the fun stuff, let’s break down those posts you linked!

I built the standing desk because it fits my exact use case for what I want in a standing desk and I have the ability to build it, so I built it. Price wasn’t even a factor, it just so happens you can build something cool for $50 so I did it.

I wanted a 3 tier desk:

A top tier for my 2 monitors

A middle tier for my keyboard and mouse to fit exactly at the height where my posture is perfect

And finally a bottom tier for my regular desk with enough room where I can use a laptop and do other “desk things” without the standing portion getting in the way. I also happened to have this regular desk beforehand and think it’s a great size for my office. I had no reason to switch it.

Very shortly after building it, I built a 4th tier where I now have a stylus / drawing pad hovering over my keyboard on a ledge and it doesn’t get in the way so I can draw live slides in my courses. You can see a picture in another blog post you missed where I built an 8×4 whiteboard for $15[0] (:D). Oh and my mic’s boom arm latches on from the side now where it doesn’t get in my way at all and minimizes keyboard rumble.

There’s no standing desk at any price point that accomplishes all of the above in a way that works for me. To me what I built is the perfect desk because it addresses everything I need it to address. The fact it was only $50 (well $60 now due to adding that 4th tier) is just a nice side effect.

[0]: https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/build-your-own-8×4-foot-white…

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As for the Toshiba Chromebook. After dozens of hours of research and a few recommendations I picked it up because it’s an amazing piece of hardware. A 1080p display, IPS panel, good keyboard, good trackpad, upgradeable SSD, weighs less than 3 pounds, SD card, USB ports, 3.5″ jack (!), decent battery life and it runs native Linux.

Why wouldn’t I use it? Sure it costs $350 (fairly cheap in price) but why would I purposely spend more money for something equal or worse just for the sake of it? I still use it all the time 3+ years later and it’s working fine for what I use it for (a portable computing device where I can do on the road dev work or comfortably read outside or in bed).

If you squint you can see that Toshiba getting some usage when I went to Cloud Field Day last year. I’m in the back left: http://nickjanetakis.com/assets/blog/cards/coming-back-to-cl…

> IIRC he also has a course where he teaches you to build a SaaS app with flask, but you don’t build it from scratch – he starts with a fully built app and walks you through it/has you implement parts of it. It’s a project he used for clients, and instead of investing time to reimplement it from scratch he just made a course based on the existing app (which is fine and better than no course, but an example of his frugality)

We don’t build it from scratch because it’s a very involved app. It has 4,000+ lines of just Flask code. You can’t make a video course and code something like that up line by line from scratch. It would be an unreasonable amount of video (possibly even approaching 100 hours of video), and when I asked thousands of people if they would rather have an 80+ hour course or a ~10 hour course they all picked 10 hours.

This is also made aware on the course description’s FAQ at https://buildasaasappwithflask.com (near the bottom, 2nd FAQ item down from the top) so I’m not trying to hide it and we also do cover every single line of the code and you get to see it all come together from 1 file to the final app in stages, and you have git diffs to see what changed between each section. There’s also 50 to 100 hours worth of coding exercises to add features into the app to get experience building specific things.

That decision wasn’t due to frugality. It was out of necessity and user feedback. It also took me almost half a year of full time work to make the course. If anything it would have been faster to do it live from scratch because then I wouldn’t have had to break things up so carefully into sections. The course is based on -some- existing production code I used in the past, but that’s not a negative thing. It just means I used well tested code in the course instead of building some untested toy example for the sake of the course.

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Lastly, just to wrap up, you skipped commenting on my audio / video set up. I spent close to $1,000 on everything and the reason I spent that much is because I felt it made a big enough difference in the quality of my audio to warrant spending that amount.

I could have just bought a Blue Yeti for $100 bucks and called it a day (I actually did this in the past, which I didn’t factor into the above cost since I don’t use it anymore) but I didn’t stick with it because I believe the set up I use now produces better audio than my older videos. Basically I spend money when I feel like it makes a positive difference.

If there were a $100 keyboard that’s better than the one I’m using now in every way shape and form with zero compromises I would instantly buy it, but I don’t feel like typing is my bottleneck and I haven’t found such a keyboard.