Some who know me also know that I have a couple of very cool, very weird keyboards — Star Trek weird: They’re completely flat, have no moving parts, and have no keys! Except that they do have keys, but they are just printed on the surface. And they also act as a mouse and multi-touch gesture surface at the same time.
If you thought the two-finger iPhone games were neat, this is their mother. Literally: Apple bought the manufacturer in 2005, closed them down, and used the tech to power the iPhone. (Wikipedia entry) The rest, as they say, is history — except that they had no real reason to close the business and leave thousands of customers without tech support for their purchased devices, and many more potential customers unable to buy any new devices.
So we opened a community support site, helped new and existing users, and watched the used devices being traded on eBay for over 1500 USD; roughly four times their retail price! These days (eight years later!) the devices are still in use but have become extremely rare. It’s basically a collector’s item: if you know what this is, then you know it’s absolutely precious.
But still… I’m trying to clean up my spaces and sell some of my electronic gadgetry. I mentioned today that I was preparing to sell 2 of these keyboards and my wife surprised me by suggesting that maybe I should hang on to them because they mean so much to me.
True. I think I might do that.
Certainly, the market won’t pay me the amount that they’re worth to me. From a pure numbers view, I could use the money, but a sale would leave me with (ick) mechanical keyboards.
Well. I can always sell them later, if I decide to do so, but I would never be able to un-sell them if I sold now.
Update: At long last, I finally did sell the keyboards.