Cherry actually held a press conference at CES to announce that they were getting back into high end keyboards with their new model the MX Board 6.0.
Yes you read that right. Only $220 or 190 euro. Only. It also has a name that rolls off the tongue. No wait that was sarcasm…
Instead of featuring their new high end RGB switches, this board comes with MX Reds for the simple reason that cherries are red. I’m not joking – this was the explanation given. It doesn’t have any macro keys, but it does have a detachable wrist pad. So there’s that news which is pretty exciting.
In all seriousness the reason Cherry is charging the earth is because they developed a lower latency protocol for the keyboard called “RealKey”. Now bear in mind that you can get a Rosewill MX Red keyboard for $50-80 on sale, so we’re seeing effectively a 3-4x increase in price for the cherry brand and this low latency technology.
Cherry said that they have no plans to share this technology with their partners. On the other hand Corsair said they were talking to Cherry about it.
While they keyboard isn’t exactly ugly, it’s not exactly good looking either. At best it could be described as utilitarian or functional, and not in a good way. Honestly the more I see it, the uglier it gets. I suppose it encourages you to keep your eyes on the screen and not down at your keys.
The USB at least seems to have a latching system so it doesn’t get wiggled around over time. But that’s it really. I hope that there is something to the “realkey” technology otherwise it was a massive waste of time and money, having said that, the demand for cherry key switches is so high that Cherry will be fine no matter what!
