On Mon, May 29, 2017 at 10:02 PM, ronwirring@safe-mail.net wrote:
Money. It's cheaper to do it that way..
yyep. this s pretty much.. errr... on the money
An unforeseen answer. I thought it would be lower priced to make an usb device one time and several notebook manufacturers would buy the device for their notebook. The going for thinner argument sounds relevant. I thought making proprietary devices would make it more difficult and expensive for other manufacturers to make the same devices.
exactly. thus raising the barrier for the other manufacturers and, thus, the logic goes, making sure that they get more market share.
Remarkable that it is lower priced for a manufacturer to make a device by themselves.
there are only a handful of actual mechanical keyboard design/manufacturing companies, the main one i know about is chicony, so they do at least use the same suppliers. so why don't they collaborate and cooperate??
i phoned one of them up one day, just to see what happened. i wanted to use one of their "no-brand" keyboard designs, i explained what i was doing, and why.
the reason i asked for "no-brand" is so as not to step on the COPYRIGHTED NATURE OF THE DESIGN PROCESS THAT THEY DO FOR THEIR BILLION-DOLLAR CUSTOMERS.
a manager higher up the chain still said "no", but that's not the point.
the point is: *despite* using the same suppliers they only do so because it is more cost-competitivee to do so. if they could possibly make damn sure that their quotes competitive edge quotes is maintained through total secrecy and total incompatibility by not using shared parts that would result in a chance of competitors making more money than them they would do so.
basically you're forgetting that these companies are scrambling and squabbling for tiny profit margins, ron, the consequences of that being that they do *not* want to collaborate. on anything.
what they do with chicony is, if they do have to share the same mechanical frame and key layout (3rd-party "no-brand" designs like Benq) they *totally* redesign the flexible PCB, including a total new layout, total new connector positioning and so on.
as the position of the keyboard connector is an absolutely critical part of the design which is influenced by far more factors than can be listed here the only way to "fix" that is to LITERALLY order a complete new flexible PCB for the keyboard.
l.