thock weekly — issue 001
2026-06-16
Hall effect tops the tracker, Topre gets its deep dive, and the PE foam mod still wins on price-to-performance.
thock covers mechanical keyboards from the inside out — switches, firmware, layouts, group buys, and the market forces behind all of it. The weekly tracker is the editorial spine: a scored, directional snapshot of what the community is paying attention to, refreshed each Monday. This digest pulls the five pieces worth reading, then adds the tracker's sharpest signals from the week.
Trends — ZMK goes mainstream
ZMK is becoming the wireless default for premium prebuilts
At CES 2026, Keychron chose ZMK as the firmware platform for a five-board flagship line — the moment an open-source firmware that spent half a decade in DIY-wireless territory crossed into mainstream-prebuilt anchor status. The piece traces exactly how that transition happened and what it means for QMK's continued dominance in the wired segment.
Read it if you've wondered why the firmware landscape feels different in 2026 than it did in 2023, and whether "ZMK is for split ergo people" still holds.
News — the profile argument
DCS Olivetti and the quiet rebellion against Cherry orthodoxy
The group buy closed April 13. The tracker kept climbing anyway — eight weeks of upward movement after purchase pressure disappeared. That post-close trajectory is the story: DCS Olivetti isn't riding FOMO, it's driving a reappraisal of how much of the Cherry-profile consensus was ever genuine preference rather than availability default.
Read it if you care about why profile debates resurface every few years and what the tracker's shape says about community conviction versus purchase urgency.
Ideas and builds — the two-dollar mod
The PE foam mod: the two-dollar upgrade that actually works
A $2 sheet of polyethylene foam between the PCB and case bottom reduces hollow resonance in a measurable, repeatable way. The piece covers what the foam actually does acoustically, which boards benefit most, and where skipping it is the right call.
Read it if you have a board that sounds emptier than it should and you haven't tried this yet — it's the lowest-friction first mod in the hobby.
Deep dive — sensing without a circuit
How Topre's electrocapacitive switches actually work
Topre is a third sensing lineage — not a contact switch, not Hall effect. A keypress doesn't close a circuit at all; a capacitive pad reads a spring compression and a number crosses a threshold. The piece goes through the architecture precisely: what the dome does, what the spring does, what the PCB pad is actually measuring, and why the modding scene that grew up around this is shaped so differently from MX-lineage modding.
Read it if you've ever been curious why HHKB and Realforce devotees pay what they pay, or if you want to understand the mechanism rather than just take "it feels different" on faith.
Guide — tape on the back of the PCB
The tape mod: what one strip of Kapton actually does
Three to five strips of painter's tape on the underside of the PCB, nothing else. The acoustic effect is real. How real depends almost entirely on the board underneath it — the piece maps the cases where the mod earns its keep versus the cases where it contributes nothing and you've spent three minutes for no return.
Read it before you assume your board is already at its acoustic ceiling.
W25 tracker snapshot
Hall effect and rapid trigger sit at the top of the W25 board, up from 52 eight weeks ago — the sustained climb reflects gaming-crossover coverage that's moved from niche to baseline expectation for new competition boards. The IQUNIX EC75's Computex debut and the Corsair CLIPPER PRO Mini 60 review cycle are both feeding that number.
Keychron is up this week on two parallel stories: the Orca Echo crowdfunding opening on Gizmart and active Q3 Ultra 8K review coverage keeping the brand in the news cycle simultaneously.
Cherry MX2A is down for the sixth consecutive week, sitting at its lowest tracker position in the current dataset. Enthusiast comparisons consistently favor Gateron and HMX alternatives for out-of-box smoothness; the argument that MX2A benefits only materialize past 50,000 keystrokes has become a recurring liability citation in community discussion.
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