Daniel sent us this one — he's been thinking about the whole world of specialist keyboards, the ones you see tucked away at video editing workstations and airport check-in counters and CAD rigs. He noticed that a lot of companies are basically buying off-the-shelf hardware, loading it up with QMK firmware, shipping it with preconfigured bindings for stuff like AutoCAD, and calling it a day. And his question is: how did this whole market develop, who's been making these things over the years, and is there a middle ground where you can buy a keyboard that actually comes with a shop for printing custom keycaps, maybe even a machine for it? He's curious about the user base too — who's been the audience for dedicated macro hardware, going all the way back.
This is one of those topics where once you start looking, you realize the specialist keyboard market has been quietly humming along for decades, completely under the radar of normal computer users. And I love that Daniel mentioned airports and TV stations, because those are exactly the places where these things live.
Fun fact — DeepSeek V four Pro is writing our script today. So it is also quietly humming along under the radar, I suppose.
Appropriately meta for a keyboard episode. Alright, so let's trace the lineage. The specialist macro keyboard story really starts in the late nineteen seventies and early eighties with IBM terminal keyboards — the Model F and later the Model M. Those keyboards had twenty-four function keys, F one through F twenty-four, arranged in a double row across the top. And those upper twelve keys, F thirteen through F twenty-four, they were not decorative. They were wired into the terminal's firmware and mapped to specific mainframe commands.
That's where you get the idea of the sacred F thirteen through F twenty-four space, right? Keys that exist in the HID specification but that no consumer keyboard has physically shipped with for decades.
The USB HID protocol — Human Interface Device — supports up to F twenty-four. That spec was written in the late nineties and deliberately left room for those upper function keys because they were still in active use on terminal emulation hardware. IBM's three twenty-seven oh terminal keyboards had all twenty-four. So did a lot of the Unisys and Wang terminals. These were machines used in banking, airline reservations, insurance claims processing — exactly the kind of high-throughput data entry environments where saving a keystroke sequence actually mattered to the bottom line.
This is the part I think most people miss when they talk about mechanical keyboards coming back. The enthusiast market that exploded around twenty fourteen, twenty fifteen — that was a revival. But specialist keyboards never went away. They just stopped being visible to consumers.
There was no "dark age" for dedicated macro hardware. It just migrated into vertical markets. By the early nineties, you had companies like Interlink Electronics and Kinesis building what they called "programmable auxiliary keypads" for medical transcription and legal word processing. Interlink's VP six four zero zero keypad from nineteen ninety-four had forty-eight programmable keys and connected via PS two. It shipped with template overlays for WordPerfect and Lotus one-two-three.
Lotus one-two-three. Now there's a name I haven't thought about in a while. But that tells you something about the user base, right? These were not hobbyist products. They were productivity tools for people who spent eight hours a day in a single application, and shaving a second off a repetitive task paid back in real money.
That's the thread that runs through the entire history. Let me trace the broadcast and video editing lineage, because Daniel specifically mentioned TV stations. The big name here is Avid. Avid's Media Composer has been the industry standard for non-linear video editing since the early nineties, and from version one they shipped with a custom keyboard. Not just keycaps — a completely remapped keyboard with color-coded key groups for editing functions. By the late nineties, Avid was selling a dedicated editing keyboard for about three hundred dollars, and it became so iconic that editors would bring their own to freelance gigs.
I've seen those in the wild. They have this very specific look — the colored keys, the weird symbols printed on them. And here's the thing Daniel was getting at about keycap customization: Avid didn't just remap the keys. They physically manufactured custom keycaps with editing-specific legends. Splice, overwrite, ripple delete — commands that don't exist on a standard keyboard, printed right on the cap. That's a whole manufacturing supply chain that's been running for thirty years.
Avid wasn't alone. Quantel, which made the Paintbox graphics systems that dominated broadcast graphics in the eighties and nineties, had their own custom keyboard with a built-in graphics tablet. Accom shipped a keyboard with a jog shuttle wheel integrated into it. These were not off-the-shelf parts with some stickers on them. These were purpose-built industrial input devices.
The broadcast world has been running on specialist keyboards for at least thirty-five years. What about CAD?
CAD is arguably an even older market for this. AutoCAD has supported digitizer tablets with overlay templates since nineteen eighty-three — version one point zero. Those tablets had printed grids where each square was a macro command. By the late eighties, companies like Summagraphics and CalComp were selling digitizers specifically for AutoCAD with pre-printed overlays. And then as CAD moved from DOS to Windows in the mid-nineties, the tablet market declined and the macro keyboard market stepped in.
Because a tablet overlay is essentially a flat macro keypad. Same concept, different form factor.
The company that really cracked this was Logitech — not with a keyboard, but with a product called the G thirteen, which launched in two thousand eight. It was a gaming keyboard with an integrated LCD screen and eighteen programmable macro keys. But it got adopted heavily in engineering and CAD workflows because the macro software was surprisingly good. You could record sequences, assign them to keys, and the little LCD would show you what each key did. Logitech didn't design it for CAD, but the CAD community discovered it and ran with it.
Which is a pattern we see over and over — a gaming product gets adopted by professionals because gamers demand low latency and programmability, and those are the same things professionals need. The gaming mechanical keyboard boom of the twenty-tens basically subsidized the professional macro market.
Yes, and that's a genuinely important economic point. The reason we have cheap, high-quality mechanical switches and programmable firmware today is that gaming created a mass market for these components. A Cherry MX switch in two thousand five was a niche industrial part. By twenty sixteen, Cherry was producing hundreds of millions of them a year because every gaming keyboard used them. That drove the unit cost down to the point where a small company could buy a thousand switches for a specialist product and still make their margins work.
Let's talk about the current landscape, because Daniel's observation about companies buying cheap hardware and loading QMK on it — that's accurate, and it's actually a smart business model. Walk me through how that works.
Alright, so the modern specialist macro pad market really crystallized around twenty eighteen to twenty twenty. A few things happened simultaneously. First, QMK firmware matured to the point where it was production-ready. QMK — that's Quantum Mechanical Keyboard firmware — started as a fork of TMK in twenty fifteen, but by twenty eighteen it supported hundreds of boards, had a graphical configurator, and was stable enough to ship on commercial products.
QMK is open source, so there's no licensing cost. That's a big deal for a small company trying to build a margin.
Second thing: the rise of Chinese mechanical keyboard manufacturing. Companies like KBDFans, YMDK, and Epomaker built out supply chains for aluminum cases, hot-swap PCBs, and custom keycaps. By twenty twenty, you could source a fully custom keyboard kit from Shenzhen for about forty dollars in components. Third thing: the explosion of streaming and content creation created a new market for macro pads. The Elgato Stream Deck launched in twenty seventeen, and it wasn't a keyboard — it was an LCD key panel — but it proved there was massive demand for dedicated macro hardware among creators.
The Stream Deck is an interesting case because it's not mechanical, but it captured a huge chunk of the macro market by being dead simple to configure. Drag and drop, no firmware flashing. And now in twenty twenty-six, the Stream Deck has gone through multiple generations and there's a whole ecosystem of plugins for it.
Elgato has sold millions of them. But the Stream Deck also created a halo effect for the whole category. People who bought a Stream Deck for streaming started wondering, what else could I automate? And that led them to mechanical macro pads. So you've got companies like Max Keyboard, which started as a keycap manufacturer and now sells pre-configured macro pads for Adobe Premiere and DaVinci Resolve. You've got Work Louder making distinctive forty-percent keyboards with programmable knobs, marketed specifically at creatives. You've got the Azeron keypad, this wild ergonomic thing with finger-operated switches — originally for gaming, heavily adopted by 3D artists.
Then there's the whole subcategory that Daniel was asking about: companies that sell a keyboard with a keycap printing shop attached. Does that exist as a middle ground?
It does, and it's a relatively recent development. The keycap customization market has been mostly hobbyist-driven — you buy blank PBT keycaps and either dye-sublimate them yourself or order from a small-batch manufacturer like WASD Keyboards or Max Keyboard. WASD has been offering custom-printed keycap sets since around twenty twelve — you upload an SVG file for each key and they print it. But the turnaround time is weeks, and it's expensive for one-off sets.
That's not quite the "shop attached to a keyboard" model Daniel was imagining.
But there are two interesting developments that get closer. One is the rise of UV printing services for keycaps. In the last three or four years, several companies — Yuzu Keycaps in Japan, a few Etsy shops, and a company called Tiny Makes Things in the UK — have started offering UV-printed custom keycaps with turnaround times of a few days. UV printing is faster than dye-sub and works on more materials. The quality isn't as durable as double-shot injection molding, but for a specialist keyboard that's going to sit on a desk and not get hammered for ten years, it's perfectly adequate.
The second development?
Resin keycap artisans. This is the ultimate form of keycap customization, and it's a market that basically didn't exist before twenty seventeen. Individual artisans — often one-person operations — hand-cast resin keycaps with embedded designs. These sell for anywhere from thirty to over a hundred dollars per keycap. There are raffle systems because demand far exceeds supply.
That's wild. A hundred dollars for one keycap. But I can see how that feeds into the specialist keyboard world. If you're a video editor who spends sixty hours a week at a workstation, and you've got a macro pad with twenty keys, spending a few hundred dollars on keycaps that are beautiful and perfectly labeled for your workflow — that's actually reasonable compared to the cost of the software and the hardware.
That's where we need to talk about the actual user base, because Daniel asked who's been buying these things. I'd break it into four waves. Wave one, nineteen eighties through about two thousand five: industrial and institutional. Airlines, banks, hospitals, broadcast facilities. These were not individual purchases — they were procurement decisions. A hospital bought fifty terminals with custom keyboards for medical records, end of story.
Wave two, roughly two thousand five to twenty fifteen: the prosumer creative. The freelance video editor who buys their own Avid keyboard. The audio engineer who gets a dedicated control surface for Pro Tools. The architect who buys a 3Dconnexion SpaceMouse for CAD navigation. These are individual professionals who understand that their input devices are part of their toolkit, and they're willing to spend their own money.
3Dconnexion is an interesting example here because their SpaceMouse isn't a keyboard at all — it's a six-degree-of-freedom controller that you use alongside a keyboard and mouse. But it's been a staple of CAD workstations for twenty-plus years. That's a whole parallel universe of specialist input devices.
It's worth mentioning that 3Dconnexion was originally a subsidiary of Logitech. Wave three, roughly twenty fifteen to twenty twenty-two: the enthusiast explosion. This is the mechanical keyboard hobby going mainstream, the rise of group buys for custom keycap sets, the YouTube keyboard review ecosystem. During this period, the number of people who had ever heard of a custom macro pad went from basically zero to millions.
Wave four is where we are now.
Wave four is the normalization of specialist input devices. We're seeing macro pads show up in productivity YouTube, not just keyboard enthusiast channels. We're seeing companies like Apple add macro pad support to their accessibility frameworks. We're seeing mid-range pre-built keyboards from companies like Keychron and NuPhy ship with QMK or VIA support out of the box, with macro recording built into the firmware. The barrier to entry has dropped so low that you can buy a sixty-dollar keyboard on Amazon, plug it in, and start recording macros without ever opening a manual.
Which brings me to something Daniel touched on that I think is worth pulling apart. He mentioned that a keyboard shipped with Git push as a macro "probably is enough for a lot of people." And I think that's exactly right, but it also points to a tension in the market. There's a gap between what's technically possible — QMK can do anything, you can compile custom firmware, you can hand-wire a board — and what most people actually want, which is unbox the thing, plug it in, and have it do the thing.
This is the configurability versus usability tension that every technical product category goes through. And I think the companies that are winning right now are the ones that ship with sensible defaults and opinionated configurations. Don't give me a blank macro pad and a link to the QMK docs. Give me a macro pad that has a profile for Premiere Pro pre-loaded, with the keycaps already printed for that profile, and a one-click installer for the plugin.
That's exactly the business model Daniel was describing, right? Buy the hardware, do the firmware work, ship the pre-configured product. It's not a criticism — it's value-add. The raw hardware is a commodity. The firmware configuration and the keycap set and the software integration — that's the product.
The company that I think has executed this best is a small outfit called Naya, N-A-Y-A, which launched around twenty twenty-three. They make a split ergonomic keyboard with a modular macro pad that attaches magnetically, and they ship it with pre-configured layouts for Blender, Unreal Engine, and a few other creative tools. The keycaps are dye-sublimated with the actual function labels for those applications. It's not cheap — it's around four hundred dollars — but it's a complete solution.
That's the middle ground Daniel was asking about, or at least one version of it. You're not designing your own keyboard from scratch, but you're also not stuck with a generic one-size-fits-all product. You're buying into an ecosystem that understands your workflow.
There's another angle on the "keycap shop" concept that Daniel mentioned, and it's worth talking about because it's a hard problem. The reason we don't see more keyboard manufacturers offering a built-in custom keycap printing service is that keycap manufacturing has fundamentally different economics from keyboard assembly. Keyboard assembly is largely a matter of sourcing components and doing final integration. Keycap manufacturing, especially double-shot injection molding, requires enormous upfront tooling costs. A single double-shot mold for one keycap profile can cost twenty to fifty thousand dollars.
Which is why group buys for keycap sets exist in the first place. You need to amortize that tooling cost across hundreds or thousands of sets.
Even dye-sublimation, which is cheaper, requires specific equipment and expertise. You can't just bolt a dye-sub printer onto a keyboard assembly line and call it a day. The companies that do custom keycap printing well — WASD, Max Keyboard, Signature Plastics — they're keycap companies first, not keyboard companies.
The "keyboard that comes with a keycap shop" model would require a company to be vertically integrated in a way that almost nobody in this industry is. The economics push toward specialization.
There is one interesting exception, and it's a company called Pikatea. They make a product called the Macropad GB five, and they offer custom laser-engraved keycaps as an add-on service. Laser engraving is cheaper and faster than dye-sub or double-shot, and they've built the workflow to take custom legends and engrave them on-demand. It's a small operation, but it's proof that the model can work at a boutique scale.
Let's talk about something Daniel mentioned in passing — airports. Where do specialist keyboards show up at airports?
Airports are a fascinating case study because they're one of the few environments where you can still find IBM-style terminal keyboards in active use, or at least their spiritual descendants. Airline check-in systems, gate management systems, baggage handling — a lot of these run on what are called "ruggedized input devices" that are essentially modern versions of the old terminal keyboards.
These are not computers with a keyboard plugged in. These are purpose-built terminals.
Companies like Crouse-Hinds, now part of Eaton, make explosion-proof keyboards for hazardous environments. Companies like IKEY and Armagard make sealed, washable keyboards for industrial and medical environments. But for airports specifically, the big name is a company called Devlin Electronics in the UK. They've been making custom keyboards since nineteen seventy-three. They did the keyboards for the London Underground ticket machines. They've done custom keypads for airport check-in desks all over Europe. These things are built like tanks — stainless steel, sealed against spills, keys rated for millions of actuations.
They're not cheap. But when a check-in kiosk going down means a line of two hundred passengers, the economics of a five-hundred-dollar keyboard make sense.
And this gets to something that connects all of these markets — broadcast, CAD, airport terminals, medical — which is that the cost of the input device is tiny compared to the cost of the system it's attached to, or the cost of downtime. An Avid Media Composer system in a professional edit suite is tens of thousands of dollars in software and hardware. The keyboard is three hundred dollars. It's a rounding error. But if that keyboard makes the editor five percent faster, it pays for itself in the first week.
That's the productivity argument, and it's the same argument that's driven the entire history of this market. But I think there's also something else going on, especially in the current wave. There's an aesthetic and identity component. The custom keyboard on your desk says something about you as a professional. It signals that you take your tools seriously.
I think that's real, and it's not trivial. The mechanical keyboard community sometimes gets dismissed as being about aesthetics over function, but for a lot of professionals, the aesthetics are function. A keyboard that looks and feels bespoke to your workflow puts you in a different mental state than a generic Dell membrane keyboard.
Like a chef's knife versus a generic kitchen knife. The chef's knife is functional, but it's also a statement about craft.
That's why I think the market for specialist keyboards and macro pads is going to keep growing. It's not just about the raw productivity gains. It's about the relationship between a professional and their tools.
Let's get into the weeds on something. You mentioned QMK as the gold standard for firmware. Daniel referenced that. What's the alternative landscape look like? Because QMK is powerful but it's also — let's be honest — it's a lot for a normal person.
The QMK ecosystem has actually gotten a lot more accessible in the last few years. VIA, which is a graphical configurator that runs on top of QMK, launched in twenty twenty and has become the default for consumer-facing products. You open a web app, click on a key, assign a function. No compiling, no flashing. But QMK isn't the only game in town. ZMK is the main alternative for wireless keyboards — it's built on the Zephyr real-time operating system and designed specifically for Bluetooth. And then there's KMK, a firmware written in CircuitPython that runs on microcontrollers like the Raspberry Pi Pico.
For the non-hobbyist products that Daniel is asking about — the pre-configured specialist keyboards — what are they running?
Most of the pre-configured products run QMK with VIA support, or they run proprietary firmware developed in-house. The Stream Deck runs proprietary firmware and a configuration app. The Logitech G-series keyboards run Logitech's G Hub software. The 3Dconnexion products run their own firmware. Proprietary isn't necessarily bad — in many cases, the proprietary software is more polished and easier to use than the open-source alternatives. The trade-off is that you're locked into that vendor's ecosystem.
That's the tension. Open-source gives you freedom and longevity — as you've pointed out, a QMK macro pad you built four years ago still works fine and has outlasted multiple laptops. Proprietary gives you polish and ease of use, but you're at the mercy of the vendor continuing to support it.
And I think the market is bifurcating along exactly those lines. The hobbyist and power-user segment gravitates toward QMK and open hardware. The professional plug-and-play segment gravitates toward integrated products with proprietary software. And there's a growing middle ground of products that use QMK under the hood but ship with a polished configuration app on top.
Let's talk about the keycap manufacturing machine idea that Daniel raised, because I think it's a interesting "what if." Is there a world where you could have a small-scale keycap printer in your office?
There are actually a few approaches to this. The most accessible right now is resin 3D printing. You can buy a resin printer for a couple hundred dollars — something like an Elegoo Mars or an Anycubic Photon — and print custom keycaps in a few hours. The quality is surprisingly good, especially if you're willing to do some post-processing. There's a whole community around 3D-printed keycaps, and the files are available on Thingiverse and Printables. But it's not quite "push a button and get a finished keycap." There's washing, curing, sometimes painting.
It's a hobby, not a product.
For now, yes. But the technology is getting better fast. There are multi-material 3D printers now that can print in multiple colors in a single pass. The Bambu Lab printers, for example, can do multi-color prints with an automated material system. You could theoretically print a keycap with a colored legend embedded in it, in one print job. The quality isn't at the level of injection-molded double-shot keycaps yet, but it's getting closer.
For the "keycap shop" model Daniel was imagining, you'd want something even more turnkey than that. Something like a Cricut for keycaps.
That's actually a really good analogy. The Cricut took die-cutting from an industrial process to a consumer product. And there are companies trying to do something similar for keycap customization. The closest thing right now is probably the laser engraver route. A small desktop laser engraver like the xTool D1 can engrave legends onto blank PBT keycaps, and the results are permanent and reasonably professional-looking. It's not a dedicated keycap machine, but it's a general-purpose tool that can do keycaps among other things.
A decent desktop laser engraver is around five hundred to a thousand dollars. For a company that wants to offer custom keycaps as a service, that's a reasonable capital expense. The throughput is the bottleneck — engraving a full set of keycaps takes a while. But for a small-batch operation, it works.
The middle ground Daniel is imagining — it exists, but it's fragmented. You can piece it together with a laser engraver and some blank keycaps and some patience. What doesn't exist yet is the fully integrated product: buy a keyboard, customize your keycaps in a web app, and have them printed and shipped in a few days.
I think that product will exist within the next two or three years. The pieces are all there. You need a manufacturer willing to invest in the UV printing or laser engraving workflow, a web-based configurator that generates print-ready files, and a fulfillment process that can turn around orders quickly. It's not a technology problem at this point — it's a logistics and business model problem.
The demand is clearly there. The fact that people are paying a hundred dollars for a single artisan keycap tells you that the willingness to spend on customization is real.
Let me add one more historical thread that I think ties everything together. There's a company called Tipro, T-I-P-R-O, based in Slovenia. They've been making programmable keyboards since nineteen ninety-one, and they're still around. Their whole thing is modular, programmable keyboards with Cherry MX switches, aimed at point-of-sale and industrial applications. You can chain multiple units together, program every key, and swap keycaps. They're not flashy, they're not marketed to consumers, but they've been quietly doing exactly what Daniel described — selling pre-configured specialist keyboards to vertical markets — for over thirty years.
I love that. A Slovenian company that's been running the same playbook since the fall of the Soviet Union, and most people have never heard of them.
That's the thing about this market. It's been hiding in plain sight. Every time you check in at an airport, every time you watch a broadcast with graphics, every time you see a CAD model in an engineering presentation — there's a good chance a specialist keyboard was involved in making that happen. It's one of those invisible infrastructure technologies that nobody thinks about unless they're the kind of person who notices keyboards.
Which, apparently, includes Daniel.
Daniel notices everything. That's why he's good at this.
Alright, let's talk about where this goes from here. You mentioned the Stream Deck proving the market for macro hardware among creators. What's the next frontier?
I think there are two. One is AI-assisted macro configuration. Right now, setting up macros requires you to know what you want to automate and how to express it. But what if your macro pad could watch what you do and suggest automations? "I noticed you do this five-step process forty times a day. Want me to bind it to a key?" That's not science fiction — it's basically what a lot of RPA tools do, just applied to input devices.
The second frontier?
Haptics and dynamic legends. The Stream Deck uses LCD keys, which solves the legend problem — the key shows you what it does right now. But LCD keys don't have mechanical switch feel. The holy grail is a mechanical switch with a dynamic display built into the keycap, and there are companies working on this. E-ink keycaps. Small OLED displays embedded in keycaps. Nothing has quite cracked the durability and cost equation yet, but I'd bet we'll see a viable product in the next five years.
A mechanical key with a little screen in it that changes based on what application you're in. That's the dream, isn't it? All the tactility of a mechanical switch with the flexibility of a touchscreen.
When that happens, the specialist keyboard market will explode. Because the biggest barrier to adoption for most people is the learning curve. If the keycaps dynamically relabel themselves based on context, you don't need to memorize anything. You just look at the keyboard and it tells you what each key does right now.
Which brings us back to Daniel's question about who's been the user base over the years. The answer is: it started with institutions that could afford to train people on specialized hardware. Then it moved to individual professionals who were willing to invest the time to learn. And now it's moving toward products that don't require learning at all — the keyboard adapts to you, not the other way around.
That's the arc of basically all technology adoption, isn't it? From specialists to enthusiasts to everyone.
Here's a thought experiment. Daniel mentioned GitHub programming as a use case — shipping a keyboard with Git push as a macro. What would a developer-focused macro pad actually look like if someone did it right?
I think about this a lot, actually. The obvious approach is to map common Git commands to keys — commit, push, pull, branch, merge. But that's surface-level. The deeper opportunity is to integrate with the IDE. A macro pad that knows what file you're looking at, what language it's in, what test framework you're using. One key runs the test suite. Another key jumps to the definition of the function under your cursor. Another key opens the pull request for the current branch.
It's not just a keyboard with Git shortcuts printed on the keycaps. It's context-aware.
Some of this already exists in the form of Elgato Stream Deck plugins for VS Code and JetBrains IDEs. But it's not deeply integrated in the way it could be. The Stream Deck plugin knows what IDE you're using, but it doesn't necessarily know that you're in the middle of resolving a merge conflict and could use a button that says "accept incoming changes.
The keycap problem? For a developer, the functions change constantly. One minute you're writing code, the next you're debugging, the next you're reviewing a PR. Static printed keycaps don't work for that.
That's exactly where the dynamic legend technology becomes critical. A developer's macro pad almost has to have some kind of e-ink or LCD keycaps to be useful across different contexts. Either that, or you go the Stream Deck route and accept membrane keys in exchange for dynamic legends.
I think there's also a cultural barrier in the developer world. A lot of developers pride themselves on keyboard-only workflows — Vim keybindings, tmux, everything through the terminal. Adding a dedicated macro pad can feel like admitting defeat. "What, you can't memorize the keybindings?
I think that attitude is fading, honestly. The complexity of modern development tooling has gotten to the point where even power users can't keep everything in muscle memory. I know developers who use Vim keybindings in VS Code and still have a macro pad for Git operations and Docker commands. It's not either-or. It's layering.
Alright, let's bring this home. Daniel asked about the history of specialist keyboards, who's been making them, what applications they've served, and whether there's a middle ground for customization. I think we've covered the history — from IBM terminals to Avid edit suites to the QMK revolution. The manufacturers range from industrial stalwarts like Devlin and Tipro to creative-tool companies like Elgato and Naya to the vast ecosystem of boutique mechanical keyboard makers. The applications span airlines, hospitals, broadcast, CAD, music production, and increasingly, software development.
The middle ground for customization — it exists, but it's still fragmented. You can get a pre-configured macro pad with printed keycaps for specific applications. You can order custom keycaps from a handful of specialty shops. You can even print or engrave your own if you're willing to invest in the equipment. What doesn't exist yet is the fully integrated, turnkey "buy a keyboard, design your keycaps, get them shipped" experience. But the pieces are all there, and I'd be surprised if someone doesn't put them together soon.
The market has been quietly growing for forty years. It's just that most of us weren't paying attention.
Now: Hilbert's daily fun fact.
Hilbert: In nineteen sixty-two, a Swedish warship called the Vasa was raised from the seabed after sinking on its maiden voyage in sixteen twenty-eight. When conservators examined the ship's stores, they found a sealed container of butter that was still edible after three hundred and thirty-four years underwater.
Edible is doing a lot of work in that sentence.
I have questions I don't want answers to.
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