Due to yet another one of those strange and amusing circumstances where it’s best for imagination to run rampant instead of just relaying mundane facts, I had to give up my lovely mechanical keyboard and Gaming mouse. It’s really unfortunate. But even more unfortunate than that, it meant that I had to go back to bundled-quality peripherals.
Fortunately, I’ve been prepared. Due to my job not being a remote sort of affair, I’m quite familiar with the standard OEM keyboard and mouse which millions upon millions of people have to use every day to do their jobs. But I was more concerned due to the fact that the keyboard and mouse that I got were one tier worse than that. No-name stuff found in a box behind a bunch of other forgotten tech stuff in my house. They seem to be some of the more wasteful wireless peripherals, requiring 4 AAA batteries to function…with nothing on the box telling me that they will posess any sort of impressive durability. compared to my faithful K70 and G402, it’s a bit like going from Honda to Hongda. I was ready for the worst of the worst.
They’re fine….they’re perfectly okay.
No they’re not extraordinary, and there’s still a lot of things I miss. I want my volume wheel back for instance, and those back and forward buttons on the side of the mouse should be standard equipment for cheap mice nowadays, but the mouse functions perfectly well for me to game with (in that I’m not any worse at them with it vs the expensive ones), and my typing speed is exactly the same across them. So that means, in as much as the basic functionality of a keyboard and mouse is concerned, these have absolutely no bearing on my productivity or entertainment beyond the additional need to buy batteries, which can be dealt with thanks to the wonderful miracle of rechargeable AAA’s.
But the more interesting thing that is getting to me is, either my senses were dulled years ago, or I am a simple uncultured swine, but even though this has to be the cheapest membrane keyboard in creation it’s…fine. In as much as I can tell, travel is the most important thing for me in a keyboard. this humble membrane keyboard literally found at the back of a cupboard is still better than the hot garbage that was the Apple Butterfly switch keyboards. It has roughly the same travel as my old mech but the keys are lower profile
If I have one criticism, you know, beyond the volume wheel and the lack of additional mouse buttons and the sudden need for batteries, is that their time confined in cold storage in the unlikely event they’re needed seems to have had an unfortunate effect on the scroll wheel button. It started triple clicking, but with use it has gone down to double or even single clicks. So either it just needed some use to get back to working condition or the issue is just with the grip and I figured how to solve it.
That should keep both of them out of the cupboard for another couple of months.
