I kind of would have expected a $175 keyboard to survive a coffee spill. It doesn't really happen anymore, but as a kid I must have spilled soda on my no-name keyboards once a month, with no ill effects.
One benefit of membrane keyboards is that the membrane would prevent liquids from reaching down into the sensor components.
That being said, I've resurrected my WASD Code keyboard a few times from coffee and water spills. It can be taken apart and cleaned with rubbing alcohol, left to dry, and reassembled pretty easily. I usually do this anyway every 18-24 months at this point for sanitary reasons.
That's a pretty strong opinion on something so widely deployed and can work without any problems in a place which is very polluted with radio traffic and jamming in some frequencies.
I had a Microsoft Bluetooth mouse which constantly lost connection where I live. No Logitech receiver even skipped in that place.
You say it is an opinion but Logitech did abandon the receiver because they could not fix the security and instead released the Logitech Bolt with encrypted communication between peripherals, in order to not lose more corporate customers due to crappy security.
If my mind is not playing games with me, Unifying is around 10 years old at this point. It might be inadequate in today’s world, but it had a pretty good run for something like that.
They may had to make breaking changes to it at some point, but it’s already old technology, so moving to bolt doesn’t make Logitech an incompetent company in my eyes.
Silent linear switches are the quietest. If that's not an option, then linear switches with o-rings.
Also you frequently get quite a lot of noise from the stabilizers on the large keys. Your only real option there is to lube them, but that's not really feasible on most off the shelf keyboards.
Orings reduce the total travel, probably by about 6-8mm judging by their thickness though I've not measured it. Traditional Cherries would register at about 25mm and bottom out at about 40mm. So the user would have to train to depress to at least 30 but no more than 35 mm depth. That takes practice, and practice requires making mistakes. The orings bring the bottom of the stroke up into the range where the user needs to practice releasing the key on his own. If you're bottoming out on a mechanical keyboard, you are negating the real benefit of the device.
I've not used the low-profile switches, but I believe that they activate at around 12mm and also bottom out at a lesser depth though I don't know where.
This is why I highly recommend browns (any manufacturer) for new mechanical keyboard users. It is much easier to train on the tactile browns. You could do it with blues as well, but blues are just too noisy for office work, and gamers say that they have too long a reset stroke to be good for gaming. Once the user gets used to not bottoming out on browns, moving to a Cherry red keyboard is absolutely amazing. Typing on reds feels like floating on a cloud, it becomes an enjoyable experience in its own right, once you learn to effortlessly not bottom out.
If the user is bottoming out on orings, then he might as well use a rubber dome keyboard. There is almost no benefit to using a mechanical keyboard if the user is bottoming out.
There are some terrific rubber dome keyboards. I actually use one occasionally as I like to rotate my equipment, to fend off the R in RSI.
Keyboard that needs firmware updates? Yuck. It’s an input device. I’ll stick with my 12 year old WASD Code and Model M thank you very much.
/end boomer