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#magnetic

10 articles tagged #magnetic.

Every #magnetic piece

What a TMR sensor is actually measuring under a magnetic switch

Keychron's Q16 HE 8K and Cherry's XTRFY TMR boards get covered as a new switch generation. The real change sits a few millimeters below the magnet — a tunnel junction reading field strength through resistance instead of voltage, with a noise floor low enough to matter at the shallow end of the stroke.

thockSep 27, 202611 min read

News

Keychron launches Q16 HE 8K with ceramic-TMR magnetic switches

Keychron's Q-series just picked up a Kickstarter campaign, a ceramic-housed TMR magnetic switch, and an 8000Hz polling claim in one launch. It's the brand's first bet on tunnel-magnetoresistance sensing rather than the Hall-effect tech it already made the category default.

thockSep 7, 20266 min read

Cross-section of a Gateron Magnetic Jade switch drawn in a single warm-grey stroke — polycarbonate top housing over a closed nylon bottom, a POM stem with a small rare-earth magnet seated in its base, descending toward a Hall sensor pad on the PCB below. A coral callout line picks out the magnet and the sensor, with faint coral field lines tightening between them, and a small warm-bronze theme dot sits in the upper-right margin.

Deep Dives

Gateron Magnetic Jade: the Hall-effect linear built to be argued about like a mechanical one

Pull a Magnetic Jade apart and the parts list reads like a mid-tier mechanical linear: polycarbonate top, nylon bottom, POM stem, factory lube. Where the leaf would be, there is a magnet. That one substitution explains the feel, the sound, and why it will not fit half the Hall-effect boards on the market.

thockAug 21, 202611 min read

Split illustration: on the left, a muted line-drawing of a standard MX-style switch cross-section labelled cooling; on the right, a coral-accented cross-section of a magnetic switch with a stem-mounted magnet over a sensor pad, labelled XTRFY, TMR pivot.

Trends

Cherry bets on magnetic: the XTRFY pivot

Cherry's mainline MX switches have spent the better part of a year losing ground on the tracker. On July 3, 2026, Cherry's gaming sub-brand XTRFY answered not with another MX revision but with a magnetic-sensing switch — and gave the parent brand its first positive tracker signal in months.

thockJul 12, 20267 min read

A coral sparkline climbing steadily across five data points toward a flat warm-grey ceiling line near the top of the frame, the gap between the two narrowing from left to right, plotted beside a muted cross-section motif of a magnet over a sensor pad, with a small warm-bronze theme dot in the upper-right margin.

Trends

TMR is closing the gap on Hall-effect. It hasn't caught it.

TMR switches have climbed every week on thock's trend tracker from W38 through W42 — 55, 63, 71, 85, 90. That's the second-highest score on this week's board, and the gap behind Hall-effect's ceiling has gone from 42 points to 10 in five readings.

thockSep 30, 20266 min read

A coral sparkline climbing steadily across six data points before leveling into a flat plateau across the final two, plotted against a warm-grey keyboard silhouette, with a small warm-bronze theme dot in the upper-right margin.

Trends

Hall-effect stopped climbing. That's not the same as cooling off.

The Hall Effect/Rapid Trigger category has held flat at 97 on thock's trends tracker for two straight weeks, after climbing from 82 in late June. A flat line at the top of the chart looks like fading interest if you're reading it as a stock ticker. Read as a market snapshot, it says something closer to the opposite.

thockAug 12, 20266 min read

Overhead illustration of a keyboard hot-swap socket footprint split down the middle, one half seated with a standard mechanical switch stem, the other half seated with a magnet-and-sensor TMR switch stem, both sharing the same four-pin socket outline.

Trends

Nova Socket: Keychron's bet on not choosing a switch technology

A single hot-swap socket that accepts a standard mechanical switch or a TMR magnetic switch, decided per key, is a strange thing for a mainstream prebuilt brand to ship. It's also exactly the move Keychron has been building toward all year.

thockJul 8, 20268 min read

Annotated cross-section of a Hall-effect key position — a stem with a small embedded magnet descending toward a Hall sensor on the PCB, with four labeled callout lines (magnet, Hall sensor, analog voltage, firmware threshold) and an ochre accent on the sensor pad, drawn in a single warm-grey stroke on a warm-paper field.

Guides

Hall-effect keyboards: a practical buyer's guide

Rapid trigger, per-key actuation depth, analog axis output — Hall-effect keyboards deliver all three, but only if the firmware matches the hardware. Here is what to look for, what to pay, and who should skip the category entirely.

thockMay 30, 202610 min read

Side-view cross-section silhouette of a Hall-effect switch in 2px warm-grey stroke on a transparent canvas — top housing, stem, and lower housing with the sensor seat — overlaid by vivid coral magnetic field lines arcing outward from the stem magnet, with warm-bronze accent hits along the housing edges.

Trends

How Hall-effect quietly became the new mid-premium default

The polling-rate hype is loud and easy to wave off — 8K, 32K, numbers chasing each other up the spec sheet. The quieter story is that the magnetic-switch tier has stopped being a Wooting-shaped niche and has settled into the $100–$230 prebuilt slot the scene actually buys from. The volume has moved, not just the marketing.

thockApr 22, 20267 min read

Cross-section of a single Hall-effect key position — a stem with a small embedded magnet descending toward a Hall sensor pad on the PCB, drawn in a single warm-grey stroke with coral magnetic field lines bending and tightening as the magnet approaches the sensor.

Deep Dives

How Hall-effect switches actually sense a keypress

A Hall-effect switch is not a faster MX switch. It is a different sensing lineage — a magnet in the stem, a sensor on the PCB, and an analog voltage where contact closure used to be. The features the marketing pages lead with all unwind from that one architectural fact.

thockApr 14, 202613 min read

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