A big selling point for mechanical keyboards in general is being able to repair them, I'm awful at soldering but it's definitely something I would attempt in an instance where a switch fails. With that said, I'm also very prone to buying more keyboards just because like tools, they all have different characteristics and are a fun hobby. I don't own any artisan keycaps, but I'd love to get one of those koi ones.
I found it hard to find low-key options with the features I wanted for a while, and then my most recent build I just went 140% overkill with the RGB stuff, juuuuuuust as the fad was fading. I bought some RGB fans, my mouse and keyboard both do RGB things, while not intentional it's a feature I don't hate. I won't spend extra for RGB options on most stuff, but I won't count it out if it's otherwise got the features I want otherwise. Price is definitely my biggest factor though.
we're trying to ease him in, not just immediately get him addicted.
I think I got spoiled with Haswell -- I had a 4690K from release, went from SLI 650 Ti Boosts to a 970 and left it alone otherwise until 2020, when I built my current 3700X/5700XT build. It feels a little weird to need/want to buy a GPU so quickly after, but I'm fairly sure it's because I went to 1440p. Debating about selling my 5700XT or just putting it in another PC I have to use as a couch gaming rig, but it's a bit power-hungry. I bought it purely for the jokes, because it's the XFX 5700XT THICC III and I think the two c's making a little butt is hilarious.
I was the first between people I game with to get a mechanical keyboard a while ago. I couldn't get anyone to buy one until their old membrane keyboards died and they had to get a replacement. I pushed them into mechanical keyboards and now it's all anyone will use.
I swear rubber domes are like typing in peanut butter.
I was the same way for a long time until the price versus performance ratio really went in AMD's favor even more than it used to be. I'm super happy with my current AMD CPU. I'll always have to run an Nvidia GPU for Unreal Engine though and the extra raytracing performance it brings.
My first 'real' PC was an AMD Athlon 64 3500+ and a 6600GT (256mb model), for Half Life 2. since then I'd had a couple that were all Intel/Nvidia, but I wanted to try something different this time around and went all AMD. I had no complaints about my Haswell setup, but man the difference in performance upgrading was noticable even just in Windows, much less running applications and games.
I'm gonna challenge on this one -- Raytracing seems to be the big selling point for Nvidia hardware, but the price point is just absurd lately and their value proposition has been dropping with the 40 series. I haven't looked at the 7000 series AMD stuff, but the 6950 for ~$600 seems to be a good option, at least to not be stuck with 8gb of VRAM [still].
Apple stuff is a decent OS held hostage by mediocre hardware.
