Because typing on a capacitive tablet would be tiring. You can't rest your fingers anywhere without registering a touch, so you lose all the benefits of a home row. You need to be able to distinguish between resting contact and a positive press, and capacitives would make that hard. Not impossible, but not easy either, and tablets today don't do it.

Not sure what you're explaining? I'm just pointing out that their metric is extremely flawed and can be easily gamed by an inferior solution. Like the Apple Magic.

I'm not seeing how its "gaming the metric" to include travel time of the key on a keyboard. Typing is ultimately a physical interaction with an interface, not just data transmission over a wire. Therefore, if we are measuring the latency of the input we must include physical travel time. Consider an extreme example, if each "key" used a control lever, like the type on a tractor or used to control thrust in an airplane, we'll just say 90 degrees with a radius of 8", with a significant amount of linear activation force(relative to a keyboard). It wouldn't matter if the device had response time that was virtually instant when you reached the activation point, the input latency of this system would be so significant as to be impractical for most typing tasks. If anything excluding travel time would be gaming the metric.

There is no expectation of a character appearing on screen until the click. So the latency between key touch and click has no feel of latency to a person.

The flip side is that there is no expectation of a character appearing until the click happens. So a keyboard with a click which reduced latency by a lot would start showing characters before the click occurred -- and this would be incorrect behavior.

If I'm touch typing on a keyboard with full travel distance, I may have more than one key in motion at the same time, so the latency of each keypress doesn't exactly add.

Additionally, if you're talking gaming keyboards as article goes into, you don't time your "shot" for when you first touch the key. The timing of the shot is relative to when the click happens. You might even milk the key the same way you milk a trigger on a gun. Or if you're in a rapid fire use you flutter back and forth across the threshold with a clickless switch like cherry reds, and you don't use the full travel of the key. Either of these the latency measure in the article doesn't line up with real world use.

>I'm not seeing how its "gaming the metric" to include travel time of the key on a keyboard.

Because if we remove travel time by using a capacitive keyboard you end up with something that is objectively a worse keyboard. Replacing the capacitors with strain gauges so you can rest your fingers on the home row without activating them results in an worse keyboard yet again.

Any metric that when optimized produces an objectively worse product is a bad metric and optimizing a bad metric is gaming it.

This is quite literally about as subjective as it gets. You like a thunk when you type, and there isn’t anything wrong with that, but other people really like short stroke keys, and they might even find the keyboard you described delightful, especially—I would imagine— if it was paired with a nice, timely audio queue and haptics.

I know several people who absolutely loved the butterfly keyboards, and I found them a joy to type on in short bursts. However I, personally, have too heavy of hands/fingers for them and prefer ~80g actuation force so I can completely rest my fingers on the keys without activating them.

>if it was paired with a nice, timely audio queue and haptics.

So now you have extra latency between key activation, audio activation and haptic activation. You know what gives you all of those for free and ensures they are always timed correctly?

A physical key.

>I know several people who absolutely loved the butterfly keyboards, and I found them a joy to type on in short bursts. However I, personally, have too heavy of hands/fingers for them and prefer ~80g actuation force so I can completely rest my fingers on the keys without activating them.

Activation force and key travel distance have nothing to do with each other. I'm half tempted to build a strain gauge keyboard with zero travel just so people can pay me to see how bad they are.

The less physical feedback a keyboard gives you the more typos you make using it. Arguing that keyboards which encourage you to make more typos are good is as stupid as saying that camouflaged stop signs are as good as the old fashioned red ones.

This isn't an opinion, this is objectively true.

>The less physical feedback a keyboard gives you the more typos you make using it. Arguing that keyboards which encourage you to make typos are good is as stupid… this is objectively true.

This seems like a tenuous assumption. It completely ignores the main point I have, which is that different users have different preference. That’s why I brought up activation force, because my problem with the magic keyboard wasn’t the feedback, which I absolutely loved, but the activation force of the keys. I and many others have never found the amount of feedback on the Magic keyboard to be inadequate. You are projecting your personal perception that a large amount of key travel distance makes you type more accurately and is therefore desirable(to you), into an axiomatic truth about the nature of keyboards for everyone(i.e. that significant travel distance is needed to make a high quality keyboard and therefore shouldn’t be counted in a metric about the latency of inputs).

I'll make you a keyboard with 80g zero travel keys for $1,500 if you think they are so great.

It’s not an “objectively worse product”. It’s a product that does well on some metrics (size, apparently latency) and does poorly on others (famously, durability). Then there’s the completely subjective aspect of what sort of feel you want from the keyboard — which is why Cherry has a bazillion different switch types (and why I have a tester set on my desk right now because I’m trying to decide on a new keyboard).

Prioritising each of those is up to you. Your priorities are different from mine, and my preferences don’t make your keyboard of choice “objectively worse” overall.

You're not waiting for character to appear between starting pressing next key - if you touch type you have multiple keys "in-flight". So, the latency is less than appears - since bulk of that time is eaten by the fact that you start to press next key before the first one is even registered.

Literally the last half of your last sentence. The reason nobody uses capacitive tablets as keyboards has nothing to do with speed, however it's measured.

It’s not “gaming the metric” if somebody comes up with the metric and methodology after you’ve already sold the product.

Also, it’s a bit weird to say the metric is flawed because it produces a result you don’t like.

I think you are right that there are good keyboards that would get penalized in this metric. But I'm not sure that it makes sense to try to improve the measurement system -- is is possible that this just isn't a very important measurement.