Sad to hear this, one of my first mechanical keyboards was a Filco TKL. At one point in time, it was my go-to "safe recommendation" for a keyboard. Since that point in time, the Majestouch keyboards only received incremental improvements, whereas the likes of Keychron completely overtook them on almost all criteria.
I've never had a Filco, but I remember it was significant in the early start of the keyboard hobby. Many mods had been tried on the Filco Majestouch first. The first custom key sets had been made for Filco's Majestouch layouts first, etc.
My daily driver at home for over a decade is a keyboard that I had built myself around community-designed replacement parts for the Filco Majestouch TKL. This included a controller to customise the firmware, and that was my first start in programming microcontrollers.
Unfortunate! I have a bunch of keyboards and a FILCO is my favourite, my daily driver. It just feels ... solid.
nooooooooo!
Shame. I have two Filcos over 15 years old.
Some of the switches started dying at the same time last year. I guess I tipped over the lifetime of cherry switches.
I looked around but there are so few UK TKLs. I didn't want a layout change of page/home/end cluster or lose "useless" keys ins/pause/etc. (I remap them and now rely on them). I didn't like the look of prebuilts from Keychron or want to pay £500 or mess with shady "group buys" for parts.
So I bought a bag of switches and a soldering iron instead and expect to get another 15 years out of them.
Happy customer but I guess not a repeat customer.
“Ran out” and grabbed two more Majestouch 3 with silent red switches. Should keep me going for the rest of my life!
Loved my Filco stealth, thanks for the great products!
Sad news. I'm sitting at a modified Filco keyboard with custom firmware right now. Its sound profile is not very pleasing by today's standards but it has been a reliable workhorse.
I got a bluetooth Majestouch sometime a decade or so ago and it's been a daily driver ever since. At the time, there weren't a lot of bluetooth mechanical keyboards out there. The bluetooth bit can be a little bit picky or slow when connecting. It's not as quick and reliable as a Logitech wireless keyboard with a proprietary protocol and dongle. However, the keyboard itself is like nothing Logitech makes. If you know, you know.
I'd absolutely buy another one of these right now if it were showing even the slightest signs of wear, but it's not. Bulletproof. The only keyboard I still use that's older is a Model M.
Filco really put quality first. It's a shame to see them go.
I have 2 of their Filco Majestouch 2 models. The are great and this make me sad as I had planed to buy a new model when I visit Japan again in a few months.
Years ago I ordered Ninja 2 from Japan and was sadly expecting to pay another 20% or so in customs fees, but the price was given in yen, and the customs probably couldn’t figure it out, so they released it to me for free. It’s still going strong.
Am I the only one unhappy with mechanical keyboards? I find them all tactily unpleasant, plus what's with the stripped down layouts? Basic $10 office keyboards with all the keys and the classic layout are my go to. Keep the chopped down, squished down, expensive keyboards.
>I find them all tactily unpleasant
Unlike rubber dome keyboards which trigger at the bottom of the stroke, mechanical keyboards trigger mid-stroke. You don't have to bottom out the keys, which reduces shock loading of your fingers. If you actually want to bottom out the keys, you can approximate the rubber dome feeling by using a linear keyswitch modded with a soft o-ring around the stem to cushion the impact.
There are all kinds of mechanical keyboards. Not every one is going to suit everyone's tastes.
> plus what's with the stripped down layouts?
The most common kind of 'squished down' is because it's "small like a laptop keyboard". The common sentiment seems to be: "I don't use those keys often, so I don't need them on the keyboard".
Though there's another kind of small keyboard: small keyboards with multiple thumb keys. Multiple thumb keys then allow the thumbs to do much more than a typical keyboard, & so allow bringing the full functionality of the keyboard to within reach of the hands on home row.
I still have a Filco TKL keyboard with custom SA keycaps, this is my go-to keyboard, and I own many including a few Unicomp (too clacky), Topre (constant USB problems) and Keychron (why do I need a webapp to configure a keyboard)
What's wrong with "webapp to configure a keyboard"? It's the same as "app to configure a keyboard", just with another option to run it straight from a website, without installation.
It made possible when chromium-based browsers (Chrome, Edge, Opera) implemented WebHID API.
Now, if I couldn't download it and run myself, that would be a different story (vendor lock-in). But I can, so I think WebHID is godsend.
PS: By the way, the most popular RC (quadcopters/airplanes/helicopters) flight controller configurer is https://app.betaflight.com/ . It's a pretty complex tool with a tons of bells and whistles.
I have 3 FilcoTKL's, 2 blues and one brown with ninja key caps. They started to get quite expensive for what they were.
I use an IBM model M today with a Model H controller replacement.
both my kids are using my old Filco TKL keyboards with blues. Absolutely no complaints from either of them. Only issues are that the footpads are getting a little worn down, one is missing, and I think I spilled beer on one many years ago before I gave them up.
I also have the Filco keycap puller. Keyboard cleaned and saved!
I now use a Keychron K2 with browns. My fingers are getting too old to use blues on a regular basis.
Lost another keyboard to Diatec
Pepperidge Farm remembers that commercial.
One of my colleagues has a mechanical keyboard - possibly a Filco - that they use in preference to their crappy corporate-issued one, and i have come to loathe the machinegun sound. I get that they feel good to use, and the haptic and audible feedback combo is particularly effective. But for the love of $deity I just want the noise to stop.
FWIW, not all mechanicals are loud. The clicky audible feedback is a deliberate thing on some types of switch, and you can get others with less or even virtually no noise.
So much preferable to people talking around you all day. The typing sound fades into background like waterfall noise; chatter never does for me.
It’s nothing to do with the manufacturer. I have 3 Filco Majestouch TKL keyboards, all with Cherry MX “silent” Red switches. They are quiet in and of themselves.
The only noise from them is if I bang away at them too hard, which is generally a sign that I’m frustrated and need to go for a walk. (It’s mostly my wife or kid who point out I’m being too noisy, and they are right 99% of the time.)
Sad to see Filco go. I’ll keep an eye on eBay for any bargains to keep a spare of two.
Ya, mechanical keyboards are not very compatible with open offices, even the brown switches people complain about.
You could always consider talking to them about it. A bit off topic here though
Maybe replace clicky keyswitches with silent ones.
A shame, my first mechanical keyboard was a Filco Majestouch tenkeyless with cherry blue switches, I've used it as a daily driver since 2011 (I just checked when I bought it) and only replaced it a few months ago because some of the keys didn't register properly.
I still have it, I should open it up and clean it again, probably just a dirty contact or something. Solid piece of gear.
currently using a NuPhy Field75 because it looks and sounds cool, lol. The linear magnetic switches are a neat feature but in practice I don't use any features that it theoretically supports.
>probably just a dirty contact or something
I have a Leopold with MX brown keys. Bought in 2012. Last year the left ctrl (or maybe left alt? can't remember) started to sometimes not work. I took the back cover off and the soldering job was horrid everywhere. And on that key the solder was mostly non-existent. I touched it up and a few others. All good now.
I remember over 20y ago, a filco was the best mechanical keyboard money could buy.
I bought one a couple of years ago, to my surprise it was nearly identical. A bit cheaper material. Still over a 100 USD.
The difference is one can by an Aula for less than half the price, with better 3 Bluetooth settings + 2.4 dongle, blacklit, better sound coming out of the keys, less loud and annoying.
A great company that made the mistake to stay stagnant.
> A great company that made the mistake to stay stagnant.
As a customer I’d say that’s a feature, not a bug.
Wireless and backlighting are features I actively avoid.
Pretty much this. I used a majestouch for ages. A good decade later I got a Ducky One 2 for work and the difference in quality and features is huge. I ended up replacing the Majestouch not too long after.
I bought a Filco Majestouch with Cherry blues, 15 to 20 years ago. I'm still using it, and don't plan on stopping. It's not wireless and doesn't have backlighting or RGB lights on it, but I don't care about any of that. It just works and feels great. It was expensive but worth every dollar — and might very well outlive me.
I still have 4 of these, even one of their bluetooth ones. They all work, except a 15 year old one whose USB cable got frayed and fell apart. (I bought a USB-C port to see if I could fix it, yet another incomplete project)
I agree with op who said that they aren't getting better but calling it stagnant is more than I would say. The build quality was quite high and they clearly focused on that, and the price reflected that. I own another mechanical keyboard that I bought from Amazon during the pandemic and I already started getting ghost tapping (I only used it for dev work so I was more than a little annoyed to see it).
Not saying it is perfect though. They clearly were a Windows-first shop and that never changed. I've never managed to get the 変換 key and the other Kanji keys working in Linux or on Mac, much to my annoyance.
Often behavior like ghost-tapping, double-inputs, etc aren't actually an issue with the board, but rather with the switches. A lot of newer boards come with hotswappable switches which makes it easy to fix this without soldering.
Problems with the circuit board or the firmware it runs are certainly possible of course, but what I've seen most of are switch issues.
> A great company that made the mistake to stay stagnant.
Sometimes, a company like this is very few people who made something that they wanted and were happy to find others wanted it as well.
So you call it a mistake, but it may very well have been intentional.
I think intentional. My point is refusing to innovate (taking the risk and effort that comes with it) will lead to the announcement eventually.
It may be they kept operations small, were happy to sip cocktails on the bitch while monitoring production on their laptop, and now it's time to retire. Nothing wrong with that, a bit of a waste of talent though.
There's just no way they could have done something like, a split dual purple-gray-gold tri-tone double shot keycaps on lubed gasketed Cherry ultra low profile tactile in black nickel cold hammer forged milled blasted steel chassis with full QMK compatibility and quad nRF53 mesh wireless networking, full wide QCIF microdisplays and native GX16 coiled cable support. They're a Japanese PC peripherals company. Not a hype-revenue-cashflowmaxxing dream YouTuber multi joint venture. The whole keyboard industry is optimized for the latter, and I doubt it can support a real company not subsidized by hype sustainably over time anyway.
Typed on my HHKB Lite 2
You forgot the Stabs!
The survivors in the industry were the non-enthusiast players.
Cherry was selling mechanical switch keyboards for POS and specialty applications for decades before the enthusiast market emerged.
Unicomp was addressing the market of terminal-lockin customers who needed a replacement for the IBM Model M (frequently 122-key version) that had finally popped its last rivet at 23 years old.
They didn't have to chase trends, minimizing risk and keeping scale high.
Mid-price enthusiast players are under the risk of irrelevance from cheaper/better competitors. The higher-end of the market-- the Steelseries, Corsair, Razer, Das Keyboards-- are being perpetually undercut by the Redragons, Akkos, Aulas, and a bunch of AliExpress/Amazon no-names. They might be able to hold some ground by virtue of "You can get it for $89 today at Micro Centre and not have to dig into it too hard", but they're very interchangeable (maybe RGB and programming ecosystems matter for some)
Boutique vendors might be able to keep things running by going from trend to trend or relying on a small, dedicated audience-- group buys where everything is pretty much prepaid are probably better than trying to sell at retail and end up on a pile of unsold stock.
But I wonder how far off we are from "bespoke to order"-- a wizard with a bunch of knobs but some constraints, and it generates a stack of files that get forwarded to PCB and CNC/3D-printing jobbers, and in 8 weeks you get a parcel from Shenzhen with an assembled keyboard.
I'd suspect right now, the small-scale inefficiencies are what holds it back. It's doable but probably too expensive to make a viable product out of.
> Mid-price enthusiast players are under the risk of irrelevance from cheaper/better competitors. The higher-end of the market-- the Steelseries, Corsair, Razer, Das Keyboards-- are being perpetually undercut by the Redragons, Akkos, Aulas, and a bunch of AliExpress/Amazon no-names.
To be fair, you get what you pay for - I can’t really justify the fancier options since the cheap ones are good enough (I even occasionally return to my backup Logitech K120 and it’s okay for getting things done), but my daily drivers are Redragon and a bunch of lesser known budget options and they just work. At the same time, I had a case where a particular model (I think it was an older Genesis) developed the issue of the same keys not responding both before and after RMA and in the new keyboard the store sent me, must have been a bad batch/design.
I’ve had some keyboards with Kailh or Outemu switches for years and they’re okay, a bit hit or miss. Then again I have like three mechanical keyboards in total (and since I don’t need one for when I’m in the countryside anymore or office where I got o-rings to make it silent, I treat it as a stockpile of backups) so I’m probably good for years to come.
The more expensive options will buy you a bit more consistency across the board and decrease the risk of just getting a bad product.
The botique keyboard space exploded during that time, especially towards the latter half of the 10's and through the pandemic years. There were countless one-off group buys across the price spectrum all offering more interesting products, and in the last 5 years or so there's been a number of vendors offering enthusiast-level features in mass production boards (e.g. Keychron).
It's definitely not a market where one can stand still.
We've lost some classic names in keyboards. It's not mechanical but Keytronic made amazing rubber dome keyboards, and they left the business. I don't know what I'm going to do if I ever need to replace my current one.
In another universe, I can see Filco ergonomic keyboards. LED glass-screen keys that actually made sense on the very high end. Hot swaps. An enterprise line up with partnership with Dell and other big manufacturers, an affordable 3y lifespan silent mechanical keyboard would have pleased big tech workers. They had the talent and cash flow to make it happen and take the lead with economies of scale.
Nothing wrong with sticking to what works, but the way to beat pale competition is to innovate.
I bought a ~60€ Redragon linear switches keyboard for my office desk to replace the company-provided shitty Logitech, not expecting much, and was very surprised by the quality. So competition is definitely tough.
and they all suck. I bought the most silent and lowest-weight keys I could, and typing on it takes a ton of force and is very loud. Typing should be almost no force whatsoever and should not produce any sound at all, just the slightest bump you could imagine. Instead, it's loud enough to disturb whoever I'm with, while feeling like I'm not only getting my thoughts out but kneading dough at 100 WPM. It's nicer to type with just my thumbs on a tiny phone's glass virtual keyboard, as I'm doing now. true, at zero mm of key travel it's not ideal, but at least I'm not kneading dough while I do it.
Have you considered kneading some dough for strength training?