thock weekly — issue 05
2026-07-28
Cherry's XTRFY sub-brand pulls the parent brand back into positive territory on the tracker, CannonKeys hedges a TKL group buy across three mount systems at once, and the Durock T1 finally gets the deep-dive other reviews kept borrowing it for.
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.
Guides — the wireless fork in the road
ZMK for wireless and split builds: a practical guide
QMK earns its reputation on wired boards, but the piece argues that reputation stops mattering once a battery and a second half enter the picture — ZMK, built on Zephyr from its first commit, has the deeper Bluetooth stack and the split-pairing model wired firmware never had to solve. It also walks through where ZMK Studio's GUI still runs out of road, and when a hand-edited devicetree file becomes unavoidable.
Read it if you're speccing a split or wireless board and have been assuming QMK-plus-VIA is still the safe default.
Ideas and builds — three zones, not the whole board
Mixing keycap profiles on one board: what actually works
The piece narrows "mixing profiles" down to where it actually holds up: a single accent key, the modifier row, and the spacebar — never the alpha block, where a sculpted profile's row-to-row curve breaks under a mismatched cap. It also flags the slower failure mode nobody photographs for a build thread: an ABS accent developing shine against a PBT base months after the swap looked color-matched on install day.
Read it before you drop a spare SA cap onto a Cherry-profile Esc key and can't tell if it looks intentional or careless.
Trends — the sub-brand carrying the parent
Cherry bets on magnetic: the XTRFY pivot
Cherry's MX2A switch line keeps sliding on the tracker, but the piece traces how XTRFY — Cherry's gaming-peripherals sub-brand — gave the parent brand its best weekly reading in months by launching a TMR magnetic switch instead of another MX revision. The two lines never cross: MX2A keeps falling, the brand score keeps climbing, and the gap between them is the whole story.
Read it if you want the mechanism behind why one company's own numbers can pull in opposite directions at once.
News — one case, three mounts
The Blaine V2: SE puts three mount systems in one kit and asks the buyer to pick
CannonKeys's F12 TKL follow-up ships hardware for top mount, single-sided gasket, and o-ring in the same box, plus a carbon-fiber bottom plate that doesn't map cleanly onto the usual aluminum-versus-FR4 spectrum. The buy opened July 10, 2026, and runs through August 9, 2026.
Read it if you'd rather defer the mount-feel decision to build day than commit to it at checkout.
Deep dive — the switch other reviews keep borrowing
Why the Durock T1's Bump Feels the Way It Does
The T1 has been cited as the comparison point in other switches' deep-dives for weeks without getting one of its own — a six-year-old, all-nylon tactile that ships dry on purpose, because a stock lube pass across the bump face would flatten the exact geometry it's known for. The piece works through why its 55g/67g spring tune reads closer to Topre's rising curve than to most MX-format tactiles, mechanism differences notwithstanding.
Read it if you've heard the Topre comparison thrown around and wanted to know exactly what it is and isn't claiming.
W31 tracker snapshot
Hall Effect/Rapid Trigger climbed to 95 this week, up from 91 two weeks ago and part of a steady climb from 55 back in W21, as Keychron's V6 Ultra HE Kickstarter went live July 22 around a hybrid Nova Socket PCB that reads both TMR magnetic and mechanical switches on the same board — the same launch pushing the Keychron brand line itself to 94. Work Louder's OpenAI collaboration moved even sharper, up from 58 to 97 in the four weeks since it first appeared on the tracker, after the Codex Micro run sold out in under 24 hours and resale listings on eBay started clearing $700-800 and up.
Split/Ergo layout ticked up to 82 from 80 last week, with Engadget's updated ergonomic roundup and the MKB Guide both naming it the dominant 2026 layout trend rather than a niche pick. And the Cherry brand line — the subject of this issue's trends pick — is up to -10 from -28 eight weeks ago, still net negative but recovering fast as XTRFY's TMR magnetic line keeps offsetting the MX2A stagnation dragging the switch side down.
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