Cherry's tracker slide continues. Keychron's Kickstarter delivered.

thock's Aug 12 read on the Hall Effect/Rapid Trigger plateau closed on two open questions rather than a verdict, because the tracker hadn't settled either one yet. Three weekly readings later, it has. Cherry's brand line didn't close the gap toward positive territory — it reversed, hard, giving back every point of the recovery the site had been watching build all summer. Keychron's Kickstarter didn't just fund — it became the single biggest reason two different tracker rows moved at once, a category row and a brand row, in the same week. Both outcomes trace back to one cause apiece, and both causes are worth naming plainly, because the same mechanism explains a decline on one side of the ledger and a climb on the other.

Cherry's line reversed inside a week

At W33, the Cherry brand row read -2 — its best weekly score in months, and the number that made the "keeps closing the gap toward positive territory" question worth asking in the first place. It didn't hold. W34 brought it back down to -8, W35 to -15, and by W36 the row sat at -20, erasing three months of the goodwill the XTRFY MK Crystal TMR pivot had built. The switch-level row moved the same direction over the same stretch: Cherry MX2A Red fell from -46 to -49 to -50 to -54, even as MX2A remains the default across nearly every retail Cherry board on the market.

That's the shape of the reversal thock flagged as an open question in the Aug 12 piece: the XTRFY TMR pivot built Cherry's brand line back toward zero on the strength of a genuinely new architecture story, one that had nothing to do with the mainline MX catalog at all. A single unresolved manufacturing complaint on an unrelated switch, sitting on the mainline MX side of the business, was enough to undo three months of that recovery in three weeks — proof that the brand and switch numbers, which had briefly diverged during the TMR story, are still capable of moving together when the news is bad enough. It's also a reminder of how the brand row actually works: it isn't a referendum on XTRFY or MX2A individually, it's whatever story is loudest across Cherry's whole catalog in a given week, and for four straight weeks running that story has been Lumina Brown.

The V6 Ultra Hybrid did more than fund

The second open question resolved just as cleanly, in the other direction. Keychron's V6 Ultra Hybrid — the board thock covered in depth when its Nova Socket hybrid PCB first let mechanical and TMR magnetic switches share one footprint — launched on Kickstarter Aug 18, 2026, at $149 early-bird pricing and hit 569 percent of its $30,000 goal inside 48 hours. That's the "distinctive enough to give the tracker something new to climb on" test the Aug 12 piece set, passed emphatically rather than marginally.

The campaign's effect on the tracker wasn't confined to one row. The Keychron brand line climbed to a tracker score of 100 by W36 — an all-time high, and the broadest single-week brand presence the tracker had recorded to that point. That reading wasn't the Kickstarter working alone; the same week also saw the B39 and B40 Alice boards ship, and early Q11 Ultra reviews landing glowing, extending the climb thock's June coverage of Keychron's product-ladder strategy first tracked. Three separate product stories, three different buyer segments — budget Alice boards, a flagship split-wireless board, and a crowdfunded hybrid-switch gaming board — all posting in the same seven-day window is a different kind of momentum than one launch carrying a brand score by itself, even if the Kickstarter was the loudest of the three. The Hall Effect/Rapid Trigger category row, which had sat flat at 97 for two straight weeks when the Aug 12 piece published and then dipped to 96 in W35, ticked back up to 98 in W36 — credited, per that week's tracker note, specifically to the Kickstarter's funding performance rather than to the Alice or Q11 Ultra news. One launch, two rows, both moving. It's the same multi-board momentum thock's ZMK mainstream-shift piece flagged when Keychron picked ZMK as the firmware platform for its flagship Q Ultra line at CES 2026 — a different product, same ladder, still compounding.

One cause on each side

Lay the two trajectories side by side and the mechanism is identical, just pointed in opposite directions. On the Cherry side, one narrow, specific, unaddressed problem — stem wobble and acoustic inconsistency on a single new switch — quietly dragged down both the switch-level row it originated on and the brand-level row sitting above it, because Cherry never gave the tracker's weekly news cycle a reason to move past it. On the Keychron side, one broad, well-timed launch did the identical job in reverse: a single Kickstarter, distinctive enough to be its own story, was large enough to lift both the category row it competes in and the brand row sitting above that.

Neither pattern is really about Hall-effect or magnetic switches specifically. It's about how much a tracker row can be moved by a single event when that event is left alone to compound, for better or worse, across several weeks without a competing story arriving to interrupt it. Cherry had three months of competing good news; a silence let one bad story erase it. Keychron had a single loud one, and there was nothing loud enough on the other side of the ledger to blunt it. Read that way, the two trajectories aren't really opposites so much as the same lesson twice: a tracker score this granular rewards vendors who keep giving the weekly news cycle something new to talk about, and punishes the ones who let a single story — good or bad — sit unanswered.

What to watch

Two threads carry this forward. The first is whether Cherry issues any official response to the Lumina Brown complaints before the slide reaches the depths the brand line sat at earlier this summer — a response resets the news cycle the same way the XTRFY launch once did; continued silence just gives the tracker another week to keep compounding, and W36's -20 is not obviously a floor. The second is whether the V6 Ultra Hybrid's funding number survives contact with actual review units and shipped hardware, the same durability question thock's Nova Socket piece raised before the campaign even opened. A tracker score of 100 is a ceiling, not a guarantee — the more interesting number won't show up until backers have boards in hand and the socket's mixed-switch reliability gets tested outside a Kickstarter demo video. Whichever of those two stories the tracker is still telling by the time thock checks back in, it's unlikely to be a quiet one.