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Trends

How taste in switches, layouts, and keycaps moves week-to-week. Editorial reads first; the tracker dashboard is one click away.

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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

More Trends pieces

Trends

GMK CYL TA Neo's group buy is closed — here's what a November 2026 ship estimate actually means

GMK CYL TA Neo closed its group buy July 17, 2026 after a June 19 open, and the thock trends tracker has logged two straight weeks of cooling attention since. That's not a warning sign — it's what every closed keycap buy looks like while it waits on production.

thockAug 3, 20267 min read

A UK vendor node rendered as a small coral-outlined hub in the upper canvas, with roughly a dozen thin threads fanning outward and downward to a loose scatter of small rounded rectangles — some labeled as regional keycap-run nodes, one or two distinguished with a heavier coral outline to mark the vendor's own house-kit projects — over a warm-grey map-like backdrop suggesting UK/EU distribution.

Trends

Prototypist and the multi-project vendor model

Prototypist rarely carries just one thing at a time. The UK vendor's tracker signal has spent 2026 rising and falling with how many group buys it's running at once — and in July 2026 it's climbing again on the strength of its own pipeline rather than someone else's.

thockJul 18, 20266 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

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

Trends

GMK CYL OG Extensions climbed eight interest-check weeks, then opened a group buy of its own

An interest check posted on Geekhack pulled ahead of both open GMK CYL group buys on the thock trends tracker — eight straight weekly reads without a single flat week — before opening a group buy of its own that has kept climbing since.

thockJun 25, 20267 min read

Trends

Keychron's Quiet Takeover: How One Brand Became the Mechanical Keyboard Default

Ask almost anyone — a forum regular, a YouTube comment section, a Discord server for people who just bought their first mechanical keyboard — what board to get, and you'll hear the same answer. This is how that happened.

thockJun 15, 202610 min read

Sparkline chart showing hall-effect switch score climbing upward, with a keyboard silhouette in the background

Trends

Gaming Boards Are Winning the Spec War, and Enthusiasts Are Paying Attention

Hall-effect sensors and Rapid Trigger have done what RGB lighting and polling-rate marketing never could: closed the spec gap between gaming keyboards and enthusiast builds at the hardware layer. The divide persists in culture and community, but at the switch and firmware level, the lines are dissolving.

thockJun 12, 20268 min read

Trends

DCS Grass Valley closes: what the profile's 2026 run tells us

Grass Valley's group buy closed 2026-06-01 and the tracker dropped -18 that same week — but DCS Dolch opened the same day at +29. The momentum didn't dissipate; it transferred.

thockMay 19, 20269 min read

Trends

DCS Olivetti and the quiet rebellion against Cherry orthodoxy

A March group buy closed strong, and eight weeks of steady tracker movement later, DCS Olivetti is the clearest sign that experienced builders are ready to argue about profile again.

thockMay 14, 20268 min read

Trends

Reading the Trends Tracker

thock's Trends Tracker is a weekly snapshot of what is rising, falling, or holding flat across the hobby — switches, keycaps, layouts, vendors, and brands, scored on a single -100 to 100 scale and updated each Monday. This is what the columns mean and what they do not.

thockMay 8, 20265 min read

Top-down line silhouette of an Alice-layout keyboard, drawn in a single warm-grey stroke with a dusty-rose splash washing one cluster and a single brass-accent keycap on the right home row.

Trends

The slow fade of Alice layouts

Alice mounts had a clear moment between 2021 and 2023 — the splayed alphas, the angled bar, the promise of a typing posture that didn't twist your wrists. The thock trends snapshot for 2026-W19 pegs Alice movement at -18 and trending down. The layout still has loyal users, but the curve has bent.

thockMay 5, 20265 min read

Centered vendor hub — a plum-filled keyboard-shaped node with an inner diamond mark — in the upper-mid canvas, with five arrows fanning out beneath it to a low arc of five product-variant board silhouettes (each a small rounded-rect keyboard outline with faint key-dot rows and tiny config-tag lines beneath); a single plum sparkline rises left-to-right along the bottom of the canvas, peaking at the right edge with a focal dot.

Trends

When customs became vendor-first

From 2018 through 2022 the typical custom shipped through one host vendor and a fan of regional proxies; by 2026 the baseline custom is a configurator on a vendor's own storefront. Boards moved. Keycap group buys mostly didn't.

thockMay 4, 20266 min read

Trends

The split/ergo cohort grew up

Split and ergonomic boards spent a decade as a hobbyist sub-cohort orbiting a stagger-majority. By 2026 the Voyager line, the Glove80, and a steady trickle of r/mk transition posts have pushed split/ergo across a visibility threshold — still a minority, but now a reference category instead of a footnote.

thockMay 2, 20265 min read

Trends

How 'thock' became an acoustic spec, not an accident

A decade ago a thocky board was the win condition of a $300 custom — the payoff for the right switches, the right lube job, the right patience. In 2026 the same sound is table-stakes for a $150 prebuilt: factory-lubed switches, silicone dampening, gasket-mounted plates, PBT doubleshot. The stack that used to be enthusiast-only is now what mid-tier vendors design toward from day one.

thockApr 26, 20268 min read

Trends

How 75 percent became the default custom layout

Two years ago a custom-board recommendation defaulted to 65% with a polite note about 75% as the next step up. The KBD75 v3's staying power as a default recommendation, the QK75, and a crowded mid-tier have flipped that order. 75% is now the layout customs reach for first.

thockApr 24, 20265 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

Stylized firmware-stack silhouette rendered as three layered horizontal slabs in 2px warm-grey stroke on a 1200x750 transparent canvas, with a coral wireless-signal arc radiating from the top slab and a warm-bronze board-edge highlight running along the lower edge of the bottom slab — accent dot at the apex of the coral arc.

Trends

ZMK is becoming the wireless default for premium prebuilts

A five-board flagship lineup running ZMK isn't a niche move; it's a market signal that an open-source firmware that lived in DIY-wireless territory for half a decade has crossed into mainstream-prebuilt anchor status. The vendor side has finally caught up with where the cohort already was.

thockApr 15, 20269 min read

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