What are the keyboards like on these things? My previous laptop (bought May 2014) was Clevo¹ (Horize W550SU-1), and its keyboard was OK but not great at the start, poor within one year (lost all crispness of feel) and close to unusable (spongy all over, activation issues in a few of the most commonly typed keys and especially the space key) within two.
Now I have a Surface Book, whose keyboard feels great, but it has two major problems: ① a modal Fn key (where tapping it, which happens all the time by accident, toggles its mode); and ② its matrix is awful: typing at full speed, it likes to drop and transpose letters in some words (e.g. “mouse” may come out as “moes” or “moeu”!) because it can’t handle even 3-key rollover properly.
For my next laptop I’d consider a Clevo build because they do tend to check the boxes nicely in most regards (e.g. https://www.metabox.com.au/store/b249/Metabox-Multimedia-Pho... looks great on paper: AU$2,000 for 15″ with 4K IPS and other good specs; touch/pen support is the only thing I would expect to miss), but unless I have reason to expect the keyboard is better than the one I experienced, I’m leery.
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¹ At the time I was price-sensitive but wanted a decent screen, my first laptop having been a second-hand HP 6710b with a 1680×1050 screen; I was not willing to accept 1366×768. For a 1920×1080 IPS panel, the cheapest brand-name option was around AU$1,400, but a Clevo one at AU$1,000 had better specs all round save for using integrated graphics rather than a dedicated graphics card, which was plus for me as I didn’t need dedicated and would prefer to save the battery life, weight and bulk.
I probably don't use my keyboard enough to really know. My system76 laptop is a desktop replacement and 99% of my use with it is with external keyboard/mouse/monitors.
Now I have a Surface Book, whose keyboard feels great, but it has two major problems: ① a modal Fn key (where tapping it, which happens all the time by accident, toggles its mode); and ② its matrix is awful: typing at full speed, it likes to drop and transpose letters in some words (e.g. “mouse” may come out as “moes” or “moeu”!) because it can’t handle even 3-key rollover properly.
For my next laptop I’d consider a Clevo build because they do tend to check the boxes nicely in most regards (e.g. https://www.metabox.com.au/store/b249/Metabox-Multimedia-Pho... looks great on paper: AU$2,000 for 15″ with 4K IPS and other good specs; touch/pen support is the only thing I would expect to miss), but unless I have reason to expect the keyboard is better than the one I experienced, I’m leery.
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¹ At the time I was price-sensitive but wanted a decent screen, my first laptop having been a second-hand HP 6710b with a 1680×1050 screen; I was not willing to accept 1366×768. For a 1920×1080 IPS panel, the cheapest brand-name option was around AU$1,400, but a Clevo one at AU$1,000 had better specs all round save for using integrated graphics rather than a dedicated graphics card, which was plus for me as I didn’t need dedicated and would prefer to save the battery life, weight and bulk.