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Comment by bad_alloc | Hacker News Reader

This is wierd, ZF primarily builds gearboxes and car parts. What can they do with a keyboard company?

Cherry is hardly a keyboard company, they make industrial switches, sensors, and control systems. mechanical keyboard switches are just one product.

It reads to me that ZF is absorbing the industrial side of Cherry and spun out the keyboard/key switch side to a private equity firm (GENUI).

If you like Cherry switches in keyboards, this should probably be seen as a good thing.

They also make lots of terrible, bog-standard, 20 EUR rubber-dome keyboards too -- but maybe those are not seen outside of Germany.

I've seen a lot of them in Spain and I can confirm those are absolutely terrible

I've got the UK version of one of their bog-standard rubber dome keyboards and it's decent enough, for a rubber dome keyboard anyway. Think it cost less than the equivalent of 10 EUR too.

I mean, one of the largest manufacture of generic Cherry switches is Kailh, who manufactures thousands of automotive limit and button switches.

Sell keyboards I expect.

They presumably have engineering and marketing staff so they should do great.

They actually seem like pretty good fits. Gear boxes and lots of car parts is basically precision manufacturing. I'm sure there's a lot of overlap in engineering and probably lots of knowledge that can go in both directions.

Not sure why there is so much doom and gloom in this thread.

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