Note to self: do not buy Logitech keyboards with RF dongle again

I brought a mechanical keyboard into the office. This lead to comments from co-workers. I saw the Logitech SilentTouch keyboard recommended by a Hacker News commenter, and I decided to buy the MK295 Silent Wireless Combo keyboard.

When I started using it, at first sight it seemed fine. However I noticed that a couple of times per day, I found the keyboard became very slow, the latency for single keypresses went up to around a couple of seconds or so. This behaviour persisted for a couple of minutes, and then it became better. I tried to stop docker containers and such when my keyboard got slow but this was to no avail.

So I hooked up a separate USB keyboard to my laptop, and I found the moment my Logitech keyboard got slow, if I typed on the USB keyboard, my keypresses would immediately register. So the problem was with the keyboard, and not with my laptop!

I tried searching online, to see if there was a simple solution for my problem, and I found this three years old Reddit thread that describes my problem: https://www.reddit.com/r/logitech/comments/m9c165/problems_with_the_mk295_silent_wireless_combo/

So now I’m doubly disappointed in Logitech: they did not fix the problem on this keyboard, and three years on, they’re still selling it. I’ve asked the vendor to return the board under warranty.

Actually, I have a second issue with this board, which is that it is ‘twisted’, the moment I unboxed it. The upper right corner and lower left corner touch the desk, the other two corners are floating in the air. If I bend the keyboard a little, it will stay flat but the next day it will be ‘floating’ again. It could be that the slowness issues actually come from the twisted-ness of the keyboard, that this causes problems on some of the PCB traces, I’m not sure. Again, I find it kind of amazing that a company such as Logitech does not have their QA processes in place to catch issues like this before shipping their products.

In other keyboard news: at home, I’m a happy user of the Keyboardio’s Model 1 keyboard. I’m super excited for the bluetooth-enabled Preonic ortholinear keyboard they announced: https://shop.keyboard.io/blogs/news/two-new-keyboards-coming-soon-from-keyboardio I’ll definitely back this the moment their crowdfunding starts!