brad0: brad0: Waytools seems to have adopted a single minded focus on getting it perfect and testing it with hundreds of customers for months before first ship. Given that they apparently didn’t build any customer testing into their original schedule, I believe they have changed strategy a bit. The difference and consequences may be too subtle for some people to understand, but Waytools seem to have adopted an important change in goals since they first offered the keyboard for sale. It is great to shoot for perfection before offering a product for sale, but do you really believe they did that in any reasonable way? It must be easier to get behind the push for perfection when you get enjoy an imperfect, but reportedly very usable keyboard

Again, this quest for perfection is nothing that WT ever said. They have, in fact, mentioned issues before which they said were NOT gating issues. The fact is, there have been problems. People can argue about where to draw the line, but I’ve never seen WT say the line was drawn at perfection.

For example, I had cases in the past where things would seem fine and then, suddenly, I’d start getting those wrong characters. And I don’t mean one time and the rest was fine. I’d get it over and over and over. If it was an occasional one-time error that pops up rarely, that’s probably fine for shipping. For one thing, I doubt most people would be able to tell it is the TB rather than their own error. But when you keep hitting the key, especially when looking right at it and it still gives the wrong result, that isn’t acceptable.

It is true that they didn’t originally plan on Treg so, yeah, there was a change in strategy - but that had to do with realizing the need to have more widespread testing, not with saying it now must be perfect.

Look at how much, just in what I quoted above, you based on that assumption.

brad0: brad0: But this is not what was reported early on by TREG testers.

I believe most focused on how impressed they were with the TB, but as I pointed out pretty early, the errors were really hard to recognize when you are also making major personal adjustments to a keyboard that feels completely different than any other. It didn’t take long for me to start spotting and reporting serious issues. As I recall, even way back then, I posted here that I had reported something like 14 problems!

Yes, I still loved the TB, but as a tester who doesn’t mind issues and helping solve them. There are many who would be the same, but WT has to base it on what the average user is going to experience. Heck, they may even be wrong, but that is still their decision. They aren’t going to be successful if almost every unit had to be replaced - which is what would have happened if they shipped 20 months ago! Even if they made the next one perfect, people wouldn’t come back. At least that’s the reasonable view WT would take and, again, is their decision.

brad0: brad0: makes me wonder how the heck they thought it was even close to ready to sell back then

Well, I can agree somewhat there, though I think I know why - at least in theory. It was working for their people. Any problems were limited to how those people typed, the layouts they used, etc. I think they were shocked at how much wider the testing had to be. They made a good decision to include people from different backgrounds for this reason too.

I think this is a reason I found so many things so quickly, though I can’t be sure what others found. I used dvorak - some problems were connected to that fact. I’m not sure, but I don’t think they actually had dvorak users. Some were how I type - the TB has lots of things based on timing. My typing didn’t work for their default settings. Later we found more with the same issues. And, again, some of these timing things only showed up easily for me because of how the dvorak characters are layed out which wouldn’t be a problem on qwerty.

Other problems I reported eventually started coming in from other testers. Maybe because of those micro cracks getting worse later for them (after all, I do practice on it a lot).

But that’s all hypothetical. What matters is there were lots of issues found by testers. Some widespread, some less so.

One thing I always keep in mind is that there is a lot none of us know. We know our own experiences. We know about those that others have posted. But even among forum testers, a lot have never said anything and others have only posted early on with little or nothing since. Makes it darn hard even for us to tell how close we are to having it working “well enough”.

I’m happy with the one I have though I can see room for improvement. But I’ve only had this one for about 3 weeks. I can’t evaluate how it holds up in that short of a time. I don’t mean breaking. Rather could it work fine now but in period a few weeks away, might it start getting the problems again? This is where WT’s machines for testing will be more useful - but we have none of that data.