synphul :
Maybe it's yet to come but given all the recent articles like this one outlining the flood of brands getting into mechanical keyboards, price has still yet to come down. Corsair's strafe, logitech's g610, rosewill's rk9000v2, corsair's k70 etc all have mechanical boards most with backlighting around the $80-110 mark.
The notion that the more competition there is the lower prices become doesn't always play out that way. In this case we're seeing newcomers adopting existing prices and more options similarly priced.
Really good point. I won't pretend to know the margins any of these companies are looking at per unit, but it's my understanding that the supply chain keeps prices at a certain level. I'm told that many (most) of the keyboards we see are made in the same handful of factories, and there are only so many different switch makers providing switches, so there's a lot of parity on that part of things. The differentiating aspects include lighting, software, etc., and those are costs that certainly vary to a degree from OEM to OEM.
TBH, I don't think most of these companies care too much to compete on price just yet. A lot of the newcomers, like Kingston, are relying on brand loyalty to an extent. It seems the logic is: I can make a competitive keyboard for $X.XX, and if people like my brand, they may as well buy my keyboard.
And frankly, there's a lot of following and not a lot of leading. Companies like Patriot and Kingston that have had success making other components/devices have to learn how to make a whole new Thing. Step one is making a Thing that is at least as good as the other Things on the market. Step two is finding ways to differentiate. Step three is finding ways to innovate.
So, until more of the bigger companies innovate, this will largely be a commodity market. But there are innovations...modular switches, optical switches, analog switches...that's interesting stuff that I hope catches on soon among the bigger OEMs.
(Sorry, didn't mean to write a whole article there.
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