A little over a decade ago, the patents expired on the MX switch design. The first clones (mostly from China) were cheap and terrible. Then came the ones which were cheap and almost as good. Then came the ones which were better than the originals, and eventually the ones which were more innovative too.
Meanwhile, Cherry kept making the same product line which they had since the 1980s, with relatively minor improvements.
> Cherry kept making the same product line which they had since the 1980s, with relatively minor improvements.
Cherry was an American company that manufactured in the US until the automotive division was sold to a German company with keyboard switches thrown in. They moved production to Germany to capitalize on the perception of German quality. So, it’s not really surprising that it stagnated - it was a somewhat unwanted portion of a company and all the original folks got left behind.
Same here. Minor iterative engineering innovation has been the main theme for years in Germany. Somehow hoping for a wakeup call, but it is hard to be optimistic these days.
I associate “German engineering” mostly with Dieselgate nowadays. German-made tools are still excellent, but even there companies like Rösle or Vogel quietly moved production to China or India.
Not a tech company, but I feel strongly about this when it comes to LAMY (a fountain pen company). As far as I can tell their pens (notably the Safari and 2000) have stayed almost exactly the same for the past 40 years!
The only thing they tweak in these pens are the limited edition colors, which for the Safari they're releasing probably 3+ per year. I once met a guy who had a collection of over 50 Safari pens so I guess that market works out for them…
This is exactly one example I had in mind. I visited LAMY about 8yrs ago as we were paid by local government to consult local companies for AI and data analytics applications. While I was deeply impressed by the value creation depth at LAMY, it was also crazy how anachronistic the operation was.
on the other hand, I am curious as to what the perception is of technical improvements in fountain pens in the past 40 years that they are not following?
In this case, I'm talking specifically about the switches. There are various options from Gateron, Kailh and Outemu (including switches made by these companies but sold under different brands) which are widely regarded as superior to Cherry's options.
In terms of keyboards, a good all-rounder suggestion is to take a look at some options from Keychron.
I think magnetic hall-effect switches in standard keyboard are interesting innovation. Basically allows you to tune at what point of key press they activate.
I found a mini-keyboard from dealnews.com for $20 with multicolor LEDs, that seems reliable.
I found another at Best Buy with red LEDs, but otherwise similar, and I gave it to my coworker. He wore all the letters off the keycaps before he retired and took it home, but it was otherwise reliable.
I think these were both blue switch-based.
Several genuine Cherry keyboards were in the e-waste pile at work, so I rescued them. I am using one on a test PC with rhel8.
Cherry are more expensive than the rest but honestly I didn’t love the feeling of their keys. To be fair I was after a particular feel of very clicky keys.
For longevity I don’t feel the need to really differentiate between 100,000 actuations and like 500,000. Both are long enough and I don’t mind replacing the switches in a few years because let’s face it, it can be fun to try some of the new stuff and switching things up.
Bought first board with swappable switches this month. And bit later about 70 different samples from Ali. Just the cheer quantity of that number is crazy to me.
Have to figure out if there is anything there when they arrive. But I think that is not even inclusive of some more expensive chinese brands.
Still, it is another interesting example how something can end up standard. That is the pin layout and the stem for keycap.
> Just the cheer quantity of that number is crazy to me.
The count is a bit inflated because different colorways of the same design by the same manufacturer are often sold as "different" switches, but even if you filter those duplicates out there's still a ton of distinct ones out there.
> The patent for the Cherry MX design finally expired in 2014.
OK, but did it really? I've seen this claim pop up occasionally, but nobody ever points to the patent in question. A quick Google search for "cherry mx patent 2014" shows the oldest result as being a Reddit comment from 2017 (https://www.reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/6am47a/comment/dh...):
> The patent expired in 2014. Many people have been paying the same price for mechanical keyboards with cheaper Chinese MX switches without knowing.
> For 20 years, Cherry’s patent on mechanical switches made it the only player around. That patent’s expiration around 2014, though, released the floodgates and allowed countless copycats and switches with varying levels of modification to the cross-stem design to pour in.
However, what seems to be the actual Cherry MX switch patent (US4467160A) was filed in 1983 and expired all the way back in 2003. So what exactly expired in 2014?
We've been paying less and actively avoiding lower quality Cherry branded MX compatible switches.
There is no reason to ever pay Cherry's pricing when Kalih and Gateron completely control that market now.
Also, the patent they're discussing, afaik, isn't MX specific, but more a specific thing in how Cherry's switches work (including the MX). Kalih and Gateron both built their businesses on making patent-avoiding designs that are superior.
Historically, before I went to laptop, I always bought Cherry.
I was looking for a portable external keeb recently, and I looked to Cherry and they simply had nothing which even approximately matched the form factor I needed. I wanted to buy from them, but couldn't.
It was only quite recently I understood the profile of the keycaps was actually something you could buy elsewhere, and then I realized I could in effect compose the keyboard I wanted.
At this point it seems inevitable that most of Europe is going to experience severe economic struggles.
Manufacturing in Germany is dying, making anything which is cost competitive is impossible and the measures trying to fix it are miniscule compared to the magnitude of the problem.
Germany doesn’t compete in cheap manufacturing, they compete in highly precise manufacturing. There are bunch of things that are only manufactured in Germany. You don’t hear those companies that much because they are not public but they are well known by the people who work in specific industries. When you combine them, they are way bigger than the German companies you hear everyday which are laying off people or closing factories.
For some reason, every time Europe is mentioned, there is always a comment about how Europe is struggling but when you look at the quality of life, happiness or life expectancy, all those numbers are higher than the US. People should stop obsessing with GDP.
> There are bunch of things that are only manufactured in Germany. You don’t hear those companies that much because they are not public but they are well known by the people who work in specific industries.
There is small town of 35,000 inhabitants around the corner from where I live. It produces 50% of the world's surgical equipment, from a base of around 600 companies.
There are good reasons why "made in Germany" is not as dead as some people want us to believe.
A common talking point is that the number of people working in engineering is decreasing over time. The implication is that "we are making less", but the real story is that "we are making things more efficiently".
A case in point is agriculture in Australia, where a crop farm might be as big as a thousand acres, whereas its common in SEA for a family to have just one or two acres. The huge scale is enabled by multi-million dollar tractors, drones, huge irrigation systems, etc...
Google says that the average farm size in Australia is 10,000 acres. I didn't think they were significantly smaller than the farms in Saskatchewan Canada which average 2,000 acres.
1000 acres i too small to be economic as a wheat producer in Saskatchewan, Canada. I suspect it's the same in Australia. Definitely cannot support multi-million dollar tractors or combine harvesters.
The rule of thumb in Saskatchewan is about 10,000 acres per employee. There are lots of farms with less than 10,000 acres, but they generally don't have employees.
1000 acres - for crop, typically located in our hot and dry areas - is a hobby farm. 1000 acres in the wetter and greener areas running dairy cattle could be more commercial (but I lack experience there). The people I know running commercial farms are 10,000+ hectares.
What pulls up the average would be our cattle stations (ranches for the Americans) if they count as farms. These are huge - eg. Big ones 2-6 million acres.
I know many of these companies and I have even been invited to some of them.
I am not some American desperate to insult Europeans. I am a German, I work in the German industry, my livelihood depends on this economy.
>When you combine them, they are way bigger than the German companies you hear everyday which are laying off people or closing factories.
This plainly is not true. Even the "small champions" are struggling, because they are mostly suppliers to the large companies. A very significant part of the "Mittelstand" exists as specialized suppliers to the German car, Aerospace and Railway companies. If those are struggling, then the suppliers feel the pain just as much.
I am not German, but I live in Germany and things can be debated in detail and from various viewpoints. Things are rarely black and white.
But I am getting kind of tired of the canned half informed opinions like "outrageous energy prices" usually although not always followed by "closing cheap nuclear will do that for you". Energy like natural gas is still elevated compared to 2021 but it's nowhere near outrageous anymore. Electricity as an end consumer I can now get cheaper than in e.g. France, and they just announced dirt cheap industry prices etc. So things can be complex, what was the case in 2023 might not be in 2025. Things change but it takes too much effort to question if what was true two years ago is still really true, so we are stuck with these lazy views.
I did not even mention energy prices in my post. But it is a basic truth that high energy prices reduce the competitiveness of industry.
>and they just announced dirt cheap industry prices
Any person who thinks that this is any more than a figleaf lacks basic economic understanding. Where does the German government get money? From German industry. The industry price is a tax break.
But you are also right, just continuously talking about the price of energy is another way to avoid talking about the structural issues. Lack of cost competitiveness does not just come from differences in the price of electricity.
The hard truth is that the Chinese are very good at manufacturing. Even for high quality products. For decades they have only gotten better and have taken over more and more industries, they did this by being cheaper and better, while also innovating. The future of the German industry depends on rising to that challenge and actually being able to stay better than the Chinese.
If you work somewhere in German industry, a phrase you are going to hear is "so haben wir das immer schon gemacht" (this is the way we have always done this) and you will find an institutional unwillingness, from the management down to the staff, to engage in radical change, to try new things and to embrace new technologies. This protects German industry from fads, which quickly fade, but it also means that it is always at risk of drastically falling behind when it comes to genuinely superior ways of working.
You didn't mention it, but it was mentioned somewhere else and is a typical response. My main point is that these things are complex and can't really be reduced to a simple sentence. As for the electricity itself, most countries have cheap electricity because of subsidies. The issue with German "high" electricity price was never that it was truly high, it was that the actual cost was on the actual bill. This is typically not true.
I don't work in the industry, but I agree with this assessment. I don't want to reduce all Germans to a stereotype, but I agree there is just a lot of inertia and being successful because it used to be successful. Like e.g. Intel, and it will eventually run out. The whole Europe reminds of the tired part in that wired vs tired meme. People live a good life, which is good, but it makes them want to strive to preserve that. So no wonder they trust their fortunes to someone like Friedrich Merz, a bean counter, whose biggest accomplishment in life was that he submitted a tax report on a "Bierdeckel". That's not the way to go forward.
One of the last worldwide relevant things coming out of Germany was the Energiewende, yet many people outright reject it because it interferes with their comfort and the way it used to be done. But in reality either by luck or genius, completely nailed it and was the first in creating a completely new world. But then nothing.
The Energiewende was a total failure and a complete disaster for Germany. People often make this discussions about renewables vs. fossil energy sources, but this is totally misleading.
The Energiewende was completely mismanaged and if you have any inclination towards renewables you should hate the German government for it. Here are the mistakes:
- The German government only subsidized renewable production, by guaranteeing a fixed price. This means that energy storage was completely neglected, leading to very high fluctuations in energy price. German industry had to adapt, by only operating under certain wind/sun conditions.
- They sold out their key renewable energy manufacturing to China. One would think that it would be prudent to keep solar panel production in Germany at all cost, when you are betting your future on it. But apparently nobody was concerned to sell it out to China. The same goes for letting Windturbine manufacturers go bankrupt.
- Prematurely shutting down nuclear. The loss of the nuclear plants meant that on-demand energy generation became more difficult. Further increasing problems with energy prices during periods of darkness and little sun.
I am not against Germany relying on renewables. To be honest I think it is a good thing for multiple reasons, among them is also the fact, that it gives Germany further autonomy from importing fossil fuels from either the US or Russia. But the way this transition was performed was a total failure. The people responsible either lacked basic understanding or willfully ignored them. Attributing recent economic hardship to the Energiewende is true to some part, but the real cause is a persistent failure of politics.
The Energiewende is a total success on a global scale, a beacon of hope for the entire world, something Germans can be proud of. They did something, told the entire world "this is the way" and the entire world followed. Nuclear energy and whether it was retired prematurely or not is nothing more than a wet fart, a banal point of contention, a premature optimization and thus root of all evil. Big problems were solved, and in a few years nobody will remember minor decisions. Energy storage being neglected didn't change anything because as we see now it's now accelerating because there is so much free electricity. Solar panels can still be made outside of China, that they are being built there is a consequence of living in a market economy, and they are just better at it currently. I thought gaining these efficiencies was the point of a free market. But again, there is no real secret knowledge in making them, so if need be they can be made domestically. Whether by chance or planned, Germany hit the nail squarely on the head.
> you are going to hear is "so haben wir das immer schon gemacht" (this is the way we have always done this) and you will find an institutional unwillingness, from the management down to the staff, to engage in radical change,
And, besides this, Germans _love_ bureaucracy. Processes always get more complicated (any "improvment" is an addition to the existing process)
There is not a single German I have ever met with enjoyed bureaucracy. The government just loves micromanagement and the population has to interact with that.
In companies bureaucracies exist so that managers can evade the responsibility of making decisions and employees can evade doing anything but sitting in boring meetings. Nobody wants this.
How does someone get money to pay income or sales tax with? Exactly, from his job, what are the high paying jobs in Germany? Exactly, the German industry.
The German industry has been a decade long wealth generator. For the citizens of Germany and the government.
certain people want the rest of the world to become like china and india, top down sweatshops so they can squeeze just a little more dollar out of people
No, GDP is a necessary but not sufficient condition for lavish government services. Yes, there are ways to juice GDP figures without actually having a functioning economy that can support lavish government services, but if your GDP is flat or declining, there's no way you'll be able to continue affording lavish government services.
You can make debt, as many governments have been doing until now...
And debt (spending) ironically will increase the GDP.
If a company keeps on producing goods and doesn't sell them? That increases also the GDP. ( as long as they don't throw them away )
If a government makes debt to buy weapons and increase the army? Look at the Russian +4% GDP just because of that. However, how sustainable is that? The GDP doesn't care at all about that.
The GDP doesn't provide the full picture of how a country is doing economically, but it's good to have a first overview to later do a deep dive into, but so are other "tools".
It's an old tool created 100 years ago, and we keep on using it although the world has changed drastically since then.
Even those companies are struggling nowadays with quality of goods made in China improving extremely fast.
> For some reason, every time Europe is mentioned, there is always a comment about how Europe is struggling but when you look at the quality of life, happiness or life expectancy, all those numbers are higher than the US.
But quality of life in Europe is decreasing fast. Pension is becoming unsustainable. Govts are going bankrupt. Infrastructure is collapsing. People correctly see that Europe as a whole will fall behind in some years unless things change
They might not be "going bankrupt" in the sense that they're imminently going to default on their debts, but debts have reached unprecedented levels[1], and show no signs of stopping. If you know someone who's racking up serious amounts of debt on sports gambling or whatever, it's safe to characterize that as "going bankrupt", even if you think they'll be able to make the minimum payments on their credit cards for the next few months.
>Volkswagen payed 4.5 billion in dividends in 2024
German industry also provides millions of high paying jobs to German citizens. In the last decades a career in any of these companies meant guaranteed financial stability to each of the employees.
The "downside" of having good paying, high quality, stable jobs is the existence of billionaires. The narcissistic complaint that billionaires should not exist, when their existence is just the direct consequence of having a functioning economy is so absurd. What matters is whether these companies are good for the population, which they are.
By the way, guess where a significant part of that 4.5 billion went? And not just as taxes.
Completely false. The jobs have not changed at all, the companies have no actual ability to do so. Especially not Volkswagen.
Americans hear "layoffs" and think it means people getting fired and walked out of buildings 30 minutes later. The reality of layoffs at Volkswagen is that people in their late 50s and 60s were asked whether they wanted to retire early. Staff were offered up to hundreds of thousands of Euros to voluntarily leave.
> The "downside" of having good paying, high quality, stable jobs is the existence of billionaires.
This correlation doesn’t exist.
Billionaires also exist where people have low paid, low quality jobs.
Often the billionaires are also shareholders of those companies.
So while they paid billions in dividends they also said the job guarantees are gone because 5 billions are missing.
It weren’t the workers who botched the development of new series but neither the management nor the shareholders feel the consequences.
And it isn’t only VW. Also BMW and Mercedes.
Right wing parties often complain about social security payments as unearned income, what are dividends and why do the shareholders pay less taxes on that income as the workers who actually build the products?
Billionaires are a symptom of a skewed economy where one side gets more and more of the wealth while the middle class is told it’s because of the lower class, unemployed and refugees
As the article goes into, Cherry had their lunch eaten because they barely made any attempt to innovate for decades. They coasted on their patents until they expired and then they were eaten alive, not just by cheaper alternatives, but by superior quality alternatives too. They were doomed regardless of where they were based.
>They were doomed regardless of where they were based.
This was not inevitable. You even mentioned the reason it happened.
Cherry isn't a one of here. This exact same story, successful product -> limited innovation -> bad clones from China -> superior "clones" from Chinese with actual innovations, keeps repeating itself in Germany.
Germany is objectively not a good environment for manufacturing. Especially when it comes to manufacturing anything cost sensitive, but these companies obviously have themselves to blame. The PC Hardware market has drastically evolved and if Cheery had actually wanted to, they could have been at the forefront of that. But they haven't.
no surprise given the high taxes, extreme energy prices, massive bureaucracy, ridiculous regulations, work-hating employees and extremely business-hostile culture
A lot of people seem to be pushing some weird "anti-environmental" when the simple reality is that all energy costs
I cannot understate the impact of Russian Energy being cut off. Right now we're paying roughly twice as much than we used to for compressed natural gas brought via tanker ships from the us. I genuinely believe that the war in Ukraine is mostly about energy dependence on Russia and Ukraine losing its transfer fees through their old pipelines
> I cannot understate the impact of Russian Energy being cut off.
It's an interesting fact that Western Germany imported Russian gas since the early 1960s, throughout the cold war and in complete opposition to US interests. German Wikipedia has a nice overview: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geschichte_der_deutschen_Gasve...
It's just one piece of the puzzle. The cost for Co2 certificates is a more major reason. Starting 2027, hedge funds can buy these certificates which will be the nail in the coffin. It's basically Bitcoin on steroids with the difference that people buy Bitcoin out of free will, while the industry is forced to buy these certificates which get more scarce over time.
Anyone can already buy those certificates - but as its an artificial market where rules can be changed politically it's actually way more resistant to such things than regular markets, so if those hedge funds feel like they want to lose some billions they can certainly do that. There is a large enough stockpile of certificates + leeway when to submit them that any short term market squeeze will just be dealt with politically.
This argument, namely that politics can lower the price (by emitting extra certificates) when it gets too high, contradicts the whole reason for the mechanism in the first place: They claim a free market can find the right price better than politicians. But then they interfer anyway?
The price will rise much larger than a dumb, fixed increase-schedule would. Because the "market" wants it's profit.
It's the loss of Germany's last nuclear plants in 2023[1]. For a country supposedly aiming for net zero the shutdown of their nuclear infrastructure was a huge "own goal". Really sad to see.
If things are of higher quality, higher cost is acceptable to many.
As a trivial example, talking about a ca. 5 EUR purchase here, I bought a German-made pencil sharpener (Möbius-Ruppert nr. 0603 "Vertex").
It's basically a small metallic block (brass) with two holes with blades attached. It is surprisingly heavy and while it may sound strange, the sharpening result is simply excellent. (I bought some Japanese-made pencils to pair with it)
Chinese sharpeners can be had for under 0.5 EUR at best, they can be very cheap.
However, I had Chinese sharpeners and they actually were the reason I ended up buying a German one. Unless I lose the German sharpener, I will never need to buy another.
The Chinese are absolutely capable of making some of the highest quality products in the world. Pretending that it is some unique feat of German engineering to make a good pencil sharpener is ridiculous.
You are right that quality matters, which is why the Chinese producing cars of the same quality for 70% of the costs is such an existential threat to the German car industry.
Associating China with cheap products is a false way to look at things. They absolutely are capable of excellent engineering and manufacturing.
>I will never need to buy another.
What a bizarre statement. The only hard part of the sharpener is the blade. This blade needs to be made of the proper material and sharpened the right way, you will absolutely need to buy new blades at some point in time. You can buy them here: https://www.moebius-ruppert.com/produkt/standard-ersatzmesse... they are user replaceable. If you put them into a Chinese made one you get the exact same quality of sharpening.
Lastly, these are pencil sharpeners. Being the best in the world at pencil sharpeners is irrelevant. Germany needs its car industry and they need to catch up to the quality of the Chinese if they want to keep it.
Yes, of course I need to buy new blades... What I don't have to do is to buy a new sharpener because the old one made of "stainless steel" rusted.
Yes, Chinese companies CAN do high quality products. Of course they can, they're not lazy or stupid. But if the price difference isn't too big, I'd rather buy something made close-by, to keep the money in the local economy (my country or Europe), instead of bleeding it into some faraway place.
Some people do not consider that aspect, they only look at the price in numbers and think that's the end-all, which it isn't. There is an "invisible cost" added. On the surface it might be cheaper for me, but it ends up hurting the local industry, it will create unemployment, at some point social problems, and so forth; in short: it will harm the place I call my home.
For this reason, to me a Chinese (or US, whatever) product would have to be vastly cheaper than something made close-by, yet have a parity in quality to be worthwhile at all. And the equation of vastly superior quality for a substantially cheaper price is rare.
As for the car industry and cheaper Chinese cars: I don't see the how German industry is "dying", as it's not really a level playing field. It's easy for Chinese producers to be cheaper when the Chinese government subsidizes the exports. I'm sure Germany could do higher quality cars cheaper than the Chinese, if the German government were to subsidize a large part of each produced car. Would government subsidies then mean that the industry is "not-dying"? I don't think so.
Yeah well there are now plenty of Chinese designed products with quality as good or better than what you get in Europe: roborock, dji, bambu labs. The old Chinese = bad quality is no longer true.
One thing that the Chinese are really good at is cost innovation, reducing costs as many ways possible to make their products affordable for the majority. Their aim for good enough quality.
I bet the sales ratio of the Chinese vs the German sharpeners exceed 20:1
Just stop trading manufactured products with Asia.
Their people are still transitioning from agrarian hardship to urban factory life, and there seems to be a zeal that comes with this transition, a willingness to work hard for what here today would be considered little.
Good for them. But in Europe we had this transition already and we became disillusioned with the lifestyle tradeoffs.
Having our people do nothing productive while all of our life objects are made by others is not sustainable and it is awful for the morale of our peoples. It needs to be stopped.
>Their people are still transitioning from agrarian hardship to urban factory life, and there seems to be a zeal that comes with this transition, a willingness to work hard for what here today would be considered little.
You don't find hordes of Chinese peasants in their dark factories.
Do you think that JLCPCB offer such prices because they have 2000000 lowly paid machinists drilling the pcb holes manually? China invests in all kinds of automation like crazy
There is huge difference indeed in transportation industry - China works their chineese drivers to the bone 18 hours a day, whereas Germany works eastern european drivers to the bone 18 hours a day.
While China is hardly a happy place and exploitation is rampant - there is less on the assembly floor - not because they care, but because even cheaper than exploiting people is not having to hire people at all. China installed in 2024 more industrial robots than the rest of the world combined and they seems to lead the innovation in home robots too.
We are at a fun point in history - for the first time the ability to automate seems to really outstrip the ability to create new jobs.
Of course they installed more industrial robots than the rest of the world combined, most of the high volume factories are there.
I have nothing against the Chinese by the way, I just don’t think the fate of Europe should be so beholden to whatever they are doing with manufacturing. They are undercutting us in a way that hurts Europeans? Great, cut them off. Most Chinese products in the west are lower quality than what they replaced anyway.
The real answer is that the long period of Chinese outsourcing masked the inflationary impact of money supply expansion, which is super duper convenient for the people with power in the west. So this won’t happen absent some kind of revolution, or a recognition that the juice has been squeezed too much.
Can you please think through what would happen a bit further? What you say here is a first order analysis on a very short time scale. It does not capture the end state of such a change. The acceptable transition period for a change depends on the severity of the problem the change is targeting, and in this case here the problem is quite severe, so our acceptable transition period should at least be measured in half decades, not weeks.
The harsh reality is that the world as it is depends on what amounts to slave labor, and that is priced into (or out of, rather) the goods that are imported. The mental and economic gymnastics involved in justifying it or pretending otherwise are just window dressing.
Meanwhile, Cherry kept making the same product line which they had since the 1980s, with relatively minor improvements.
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