Only buy a magnetic keyboard for gaming

Reading this brought something to my mind that I had not yet considered. With the rise in popularity of esports, we're getting to a strange place where there is very professional gear for playing games, that is specifically suited to the high intensity, quick reactions of professional athlete. Whether you think that is an appropriate term is not an issue, people are getting paid for this and they play at a much different level that most of us plebes do.

But then you have people who play casually--and let me be clear here, even if you are very good and only play ranked competitive matches, if it's not your job, you're who I'm talking about--who get this same gear. They deck themselves out like the pros for what is, essentially, a hobby. Is that weird? I don't know. People who head out to the local basketball court typically go with only a Spalding they bought at Walmart. Folks who play a little footy on the weekends might buy shin guards, but otherwise just head out to a field.

I don't know where I'm really going with all this, it just seems odd that a person would say one should buy a keyboard that allows for 1mm actuation, when the vast, vast majority of game players wouldn't even be able to tell the difference.

There are tons of sports where the amateurs end up buying top of the line gear.

People will spend thousands to ride the same bikes the Tour de France riders do. You can spend crazy amounts on basketball shoes, sweat wicking synthetic shirts and all sorts of other gear that LeBron uses.

If there is a sport that requires buying specialized equipment, there are people buying stuff that is completely unnecessary for their use case.

You get this everywhere.

There's amateur photographers who have a super-expensive camera.

Weekend artists with a cupboard full of the pricest paints and papers.

Super-expensive bicycles that only get ridden a few days a year.

The cool feature of hall effect keyboards is the ability to set multiple actuation points on a key.

For racing games, that means a real throttle.

And it's also nice with FPS games to have the W key mapped at half-press to W, and full-press to SHIFT and W. Most FPS games require you to press an additional key (such as shift) to run, even though you'll spend 99.99% of your time running.

That being said, I wouldn't buy a keyboard (magnetic or otherwise) for more than $50.

More so with "rich people" sports, like golf.

One of the reason professional golf players get a lot of money for sponsorship deals.

Peaked in Silver in Valorant, lemme tell you, the hardware isn't much of a gamechanger after a certain price/quality point. I'm just a very tactile guy, and like diving down rabbit holes for stuff that suits me. My input devices are how I interact with the world, so, why not take some care to find one that sparks joy?

Kids these days who are 'graduating' from default laptop keyboard, $40 wireless keyboard/mouse combo, etc to "Hardware I picked out for myself" have plenty of good options, considering how hardware has gotten SO much nicer over the few decades I've been using it.

The 1mm actuation thing is probably for advertising how 'good/sensitive/capable' their switches are. I would personally never use something like that, what with my heavy hands. Little Timmy, on the other hand, is wading through a bunch of actually-decent mass-market options, and may see 1mm actuation as "WOW, NOTHING HAS EVER BEEN THIS GOOD!"