What You're Actually Buying in a Contactless Keyboard

The mechanical keyboard isn't always so mechanical anymore. Over the past six years, keyboards using optical, Hall-effect and other “contactless” switches have become increasingly common — and they often cost more than traditional mechanical boards, which already carry a premium over basic membrane keyboards. What does the extra money get you? Ars Technica's framing is refreshingly blunt: these designs promise theoretical advantages, particularly for gamers, but in daily use the differences can be pretty subtle. That gap between the spec sheet and your fingers is the whole story. A switch that never physically closes a contact is a real engineering change; whether it changes how you type on a Tuesday afternoon is a separate question. The guide sets out to show how the newest switches work and where their advantages and disadvantages genuinely matter, which is a more useful test than the marketing numbers.