Hacker News Reader

Comment by landr0id | Hacker News Reader

If anyone is looking at this thinking it looks pretty and wants to check out Work Louder's keyboards, let me save you the time. Their keyboards must be made by designers who do not type much because they are both not pleasant to type on and not very high-quality.

The Nomad [E] might be one of the worst keyboards I've ever purchased, and I owned one of the original butterfly switch MacBooks.

View on HN

I was interested in their knob1, and, if you go to their website today it still says pre-order with shipping in August 2025 (stuck in the past), at this point I accepted it's vaporware [1]

[1] https://worklouder.cc/knob1

Their website is blocked by my ISP as being unsafe.

Many ISPs block .cc domains. Especially when .co.cc was a free domain name thing and tons of malware would use it.

I'm guessing they didn't run "knob" past anyone from the UK.

Edit: as much as it pains me, this is hacker news, so, knob means cock in the UK.

It also, and I would say more commonly, means a round thing that can be turned. I've never heard of anyone avoiding the term.

I doubt anyone from the UK would call their product or company "knob" these days.

Knob the Yob has a certain catch to it.

sure it's not pronounced Kenobi?

they stylize it k•no•b or k•no•b1 take your pick

What's wrong with it? I believe you but I'm just curious... since on paper it just uses Gateron low profile switches which seems reasonable.

For the Nomad: The caps slightly rotate. If you look at them from the side profile, they are also all varying heights. I found enough variance in the physical layout of keys that I was constantly making mistakes and pressing multiple keys simultaneously. It has this gimmicky magnetic riser on the back which the magnets fell out of. The display is just a gimmick but has a fun Tamagotchi-type thing that analyzes WPM, so that's cool at least.

The company itself had crazy production delays on both the Nomad and the Knob1, and seem to depend on hypebeast marketing. For $400 you would expect a very premium product and it's easy to argue that they missed the mark pretty hard.

Oh I also placed a pre-order and they refused to cancel after many delays. Unfortunately after that point it was too late for a chargeback.

*just found a random review if you want to see other opinions. The comments discuss some of the weird company shenanigans: https://old.reddit.com/r/MechanicalKeyboards/comments/1ngka3...

Thanks. I like low profile mechanical keyboards in theory but I guess I'll just stick to the Keychrons and Lofrees.

Never heard of work louder, but it sounds like an idea I used to joke with coworkers about, around making a clickly keyboard with an amplifier and speaker to passive-aggressively demonstrate how annoying the clicky keyboards are in a high density office environment.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com