Pricing niche products
These things have become so esoteric and expensive because the mechanical keyboard hobby is undergoing a more intense version of what happens to most hobbies&#x2F;pastimes; the purpose of the hobby has transitioned from primarily &quot;making&#x2F;using the thing&quot; to &quot;obtaining and displaying ever more extreme versions of the thing to impress other people who know about the thing&quot;.<p>I feel like this is an outgrowth of the basic human desire to form groups and define an in-group and an out-group; people start a hobby because they are interested in whatever, but after a while there develops an (often arbitrary) right way and wrong way to pursue the hobby, cliques form, and after a while participating in the hobby becomes an exercise in demonstrating that you&#x27;ve bought&#x2F;made&#x2F;done the right things and are therefore worthy of being in the in-group instead of the out-group.<p>I think this is so strong in the mechanical keyboard community because there&#x27;s not a lot of &quot;there&quot; there; mechanical keyboards are nice to type on, but there&#x27;s no core competitive activity that they&#x27;re used for - you&#x27;re not spending $1600 on a keyboard to improve your typing speed and accuracy 1.2% so you can have a shot at winning the big annual World Typing Tournament in Las Vegas. The mechanical keyboard community feels to me more like the streetwear or sneakerhead community than, say, R&#x2F;C planes or surfing or whatever.