I Tried a YouTube Guru's $160 Keyboard... (So You Don't Have To.) @aliabdaal

ah hio what's wrong hey Alfred I've just been so unproductive lately I just feel like something's missing have you ever tried maybe a keyboard keyboards I love keyboards well I heard a certain productivity expert just made the most productive keyboard ever wait Ali doesn't he sell classes what is he doing making a keyboard yeah you're going to be so productive we're going to get new videos every day ah I have never seen this before in my whole life I tried Ali abd's keyboard so you don't have to wait this might be different than I expected now I get it you probably have a million questions so before we get into what we have here let's get into how we got here so in this video I'm going to be looking at some wild marketing claims some even Wilder prices and then finally I'll be taking a deep dive into Ali abd's keyboard to see if you should even think about considering it but first I want to know how he's trying to sell this because that's a really important core of it so let's look at the marketing yeah if you don't know who Ali abdall is he's a YouTube productivity specialist a former doctor and a book writer but I've also heard heard that he sells courses so let me just take a look at those real fast so his class is like a dollar that's no big deal wait what is this okay I don't see a dollar sign let me just hit ,000 for a course what you could also pay no you're kidding I'm in the wrong Niche I've been doing this wrong my whole life if you want me to take one of these courses so you don't have to then please leave a comment and get get subscrib cuz I'll do it I'll spend five grand so you don't have to I'm crazy now expensive courses aside he just launched a keyboard and that puts it Square in my domain if you don't know who I am howdy hey I'm hippot Tech and I try keyboards so you don't have to in fact in the last couple years I've tried over 300 mechanical keyboards and all I can think of is why what business does a guy that makes $1,000 courses have building a c keyboard well he says it's because he's a productivity expert and obviously keyboards make you more productive well some of them why did he launch a keyboard so I'm going to delve into his marketing before I look at his keyboard to see is this all just a scam or a cash grab why is a productivity guy getting into keyboards and for that let's go to his website hey friends hi this website that you're on light mode is a brand new tech and productivity brand that I've been building over the last 18 months now wait wait wait so he's been building the brand for 18 months let's just put a pin in that I wanted to create a brand of tech and productivity accessories having some nice Tech and gear and accessories to use genuinely makes the experience of working or studying or building a business or whatever the thing is more enjoyable that is true that's why I'm like a keyboard Evangelical for example a really nice tactile and wait tactile remember that he he said it's a tactile experience could we build a really cool keyboard that would make the experience of typing feel just that little bit nicer okay I like The Branding here and the claim is that he built a very nice keyboard that will enhance your typing experience let's just think about that as we go into actually looking at the keyboard nicest typing experience that I personally have ever used that's actually really sad I want to get you a better keyboard let's hit my DMs let's work on this everything that we produce is going to be aimed at sort of mid-range of the market so he's not trying to be budget you can connect the keybo keyboard to whatever device you want by using our beautiful braided USBC cable they braided the cable and overall it's a really beautiful nice tactile wait he's calling it tactile again that's light enough to carry with you wherever you go so this board is going to be really lightweight but also feel nice maybe they've just put foam in it and like no other additional weights or something like that oh yeah so that was the intro video however I also found some other interesting stuff on their Tik Tok and Instagram I wanted to tell you today about the launch of a new tech brand that I've been building over the last 12 months didn't he literally just say that he spent 18 months building this brand let's go back over the last 18 months now okay let me play this real fast over the last 12 months what happened to the 6 months Olli what happened where'd they go we are trying to build the world's best Suite of productivity Tools in Tech and now that is a crazy claim these are the best tools for productivity now the other stuff he was actually like quite delicate about it he was like a this might feel nice this might help you type but now he's called the the best productivity tools it is fundamentally a productivity brand now I get that he's branding this as a productivity brand because he's a productivity expert but at a glance I really don't see anything about this keyboard that's going to make you more productive now I'll get into that a lot more later but I'm already incredibly incredibly skeptical we wanted to position this as a very reasonable affordable mid-range brand in doing that you've also put yourself against every other budget offering unintentionally because if the budget offering provides a better experience for potentially half the price you've got quite the problem and that might be something that we run into later now I want to get my hands on this keyboard as soon as possible however there's a problem when you first launched this keyboard it wasn't actually available in the US I had to get my way I just had to call upon a certain British friend Cherry MX Browns Cherry MX Browns Cherry MX Brown okay now that was easy here's what I'm going to do with it first I'm going to determine is it a good product then I'm going to determine is it priced fairly and then I kind of want to know will it make me more productive and ultimately should you try it we're also going to be comparing this against all of his other marketing claims and a couple other budget keyboards because I genuinely don't think this is mid-range and I'll tell you why later yeah now with the keyboard in my hands I was experiencing simultaneous dread and excitement now dread because if I really hate this thing that I'm trashing on a YouTuber's product and a lot of people really love that YouTuber and excitement because I can trash on a YouTuber's product anyway anyway hey hippo you're going to say it's terrible now right no Alfred I just started the unboxing I have to give it a fair chance I mean he poured 18 or 12 months of work into this thing you're going to say it's terrible now right no o That's but now you're going to say it's terrible no Alfred go back to your dungeon one thing I won't trash on is their packaging because it is surprisingly nice with one of those nice slippy boxes the manual makes a lot of sense and has all of the macros you might need and there's some except accessories I guess one of the highlights actually being the braided cable you know I did make fun of it they braided the cable they did braid the cable but hey it's nice now moving on to the keyboard itself it comes in two different colors a cobalt blue and a coral orange now I'm not really sure how it's going to make me more productive but the gradient key caps are very pretty so I'm going to give him a point for that but you know what's not pretty is the fact that they call these key Caps or this keyboard the Pinnacle of ergonomics now I've been known to do some meming on ergonomics but um they there is nothing that stands out about this keyboard's ergonomics whatsoever like it's fine if you just want to make a basic keyboard but just don't make the claim speaking of claims this thing is entirely plastic which I claim to hate sometimes although plastic can be good so we'll put that to the test later oh what's that later just called and uh the plastic is very cheap and reminds me of a budget keyboard okay well that's fine this thing is probably really affordable and really cheap and um wait you're kidding right now it's not the most expensive thing ever but it starts at 15 $59 which is really staggering when you compare it against things that are similar like the first thing that comes to my mind is the Kyron V2 Max which is already about 60 bucks cheaper or the wiir sk71 60 bucks cheaper and has 2.4 GHz um pardon me can you tell me the difference between these two keyboards oh it's like $50 to $100 this one is I can't I can't even do this with a straight face I feel like it's kind of crazy now his keycap design is gorgeous I'll give him that but like what do you mean it's basically the same case as an RK 68 as a gk68 as any other budget keyboard and I mean you spent 18 months building this maybe because you really like the YouTuber but I would really hope that the YouTuber would do more for you then make a half ass tech product huh so already I'm starting to question the 18 months or 12 months of design that went into this because what did you design now maybe there's something under the hood when I take this thing apart that's really going to shock me so I wanted to go ahead and weigh it to see H maybe it's nice and lightweight for travel and oh don't look at the scale I use the scale for baking for baking some people watch Ali abdall to be productive other people bake now to its credit it is lightweight but actually a bit heavier than I was expecting for reference a keyboard made out of full aluminum is about a pound heavier but even more perplexingly the low-f free flow which is also full aluminum is lighter also I mean this is just a side tangent it's probably way better for productivity and way more premium for the same exact price they uh this is not sponsored this is not sponsored I still really like those boards I use them like all the time so then this mystery is starting to get a little bit deeper because is this just a cash grab keyboard or is it a productivity tool that he genuinely cares about the progress of now to be fair I might be incredibly underwhelmed but it isn't exactly a bad keyboard now it doesn't have any gasket Mount and it is lacking a lot of Enthusiast features that you could get for cheaper but it does do what it says on the tin it's a keyboard and it does feel relatively nice which we'll talk about more soon now this bottom design really really reminds me of the kedus NJ 68 however there are some differences so so I can't exactly say it's the same OEM but he definitely used one of the standard China partners for making keyboards however something that is relatively good to see is these Gaton what I think are pro yellow 3s these are definitely the highlight of the board as they're an incredibly smooth Factory lubed linear switch Gaton yellows have come a massive way in the last couple years from being a switch that you needed to lube to being just a really good switch the stabilizers are also fine but no and that's definitely a sad sight I'm not sure why you would go with North facing LEDs if you didn't have shine through key caps and it just shows that they probably didn't do their research but as I said before these switches are definitely carrying the build they feel really nice to type on and these daub key caps are relatively thick so your typing experience is not fantastic but it's definitely way better than a basic gaming keyboard or a basic Dell keyboard now the stabilizers are Factory Lube so he's got that going for it and the uh wait why isn't the board turning on um guys um let me look at the manual real fast okay it says fnr oh I had to factory reset it out of the box that's good now the epic gamer RGB is a fine touch which we always love we love the epic gamer RGB here now in just a minute I'm going to take this whole entire keyboard apart and I'm going to try and figure out if I can see any clues as to where this keyboard came from but first how does it sound stock but that's not the worst of it because we haven't taken this thing apart yet and generally with custom keyboards a lot of what's important happens on the inside now it's fine like it sounds about how you would expect for maybe about half the price because it's just a cheap plastic case you aren't exactly getting the best sounds ever and this just kind of leaves me wondering like was Ali procrastinating when when he made this board was he not productive because the disassembly of this keyboard is absolutely horrifying you have to pry these clips up and these are the tightest Clips I've ever seen in a keyboard I have never struggled more opening a keyboard I had other work I needed to get done I needed to file my taxes or oh god oh okay I imagine because he's charging a mid-range price for this he's obviously stuffed it with foam or dampening materials or something to improve your typing experience right because you really want to be productive while you're typing on this right so he's put foam in it right right oh my God BR I have never seen this before in my whole life well it has an internal weight they glued metal weights to the top of the case most notably you will see no foam in this keyboard whatsoever now foam isn't an essential part of building a keyboard and it's totally preference but I can't imagine leaving it out in a budget keyboard like this because it's not helping your case whatsoever now I wanted to try and take it apart to see if I could see any manufacturers markings or anything like that now I did find a marking for an IFD 68 which is a keyboard that came out in about 2018 but that didn't really lead to anything else now ultimately I trolled Alibaba to try and find a similar board that maybe he just used the OEM for to customize it and he definitely did his cleanup the closest thing I could find was the Kus NJ 68 which is eerily similar like so similar that maybe this this is what he used the only difference I could find was the location of the switch on the back being here instead of here that's a pretty Minor Detail but it's still enough that I wouldn't call it the same board either way it is really really weird that you worked 16 months or 12 months or whatever to build a keyboard and what did you do was it ship time was it all just ship time there's a lot of things lacking here that literally any other keyboard would offer Foams maybe if you don't want Foams any anything else might be nice maybe not just random Bricks now you're probably wondering hippo why are you so angry about this and honestly for me it's about the fact that he's trying to appeal to an audience that knows nothing about keyboards but with a sense of authority as a productivity expert essentially he selling them a tech product that's worse than what they could get with a little bit of research but because of of his authority he's trying to get them to not do the research and to me that just feels a little bit scummy I mean there's a reason why I haven't made my own keyboard yet if I ever make a hippo keyboard my channel is going to be over because it will be the best keyboard ever you can clip that and take it out of context for if I ever release a keyboard that sucks somehow ultimately I don't see any reason why I could recommend this keyboard to you now if it's perfectly fine but so are a ton of other keyboards that are either cheaper or provide you way more value just because something's fine doesn't necessarily mean you should get it and that's fine

Channel: Hipyo Tech

Views: 179,205

Keywords: keyboard, mechanical keyboard, mechanical, switch, switch review, novel keys, keys, gateron, kalih, sound test, switch sound test, keyboard sound test, mech keyboard, aesthetic, wholesome, reddit, id80, panda, alpacas, krytox 205, krytox, type, test, keyboard mod, keyboard asmr mod, TKL keyboard, red, 65%, 60%, RGB 65%, taehatypes, :3ildcat, 3ildcat, tech, MKBHD, Linus tech tips, Taeha Types, Tech Review, Banggood Review, hipyo tech, hipiyo, hipyo, custom keyboard, thock, thocc, akko, razer, wooting

Id: HoXbgKO8Ze4

Length: 16min 44sec (1004 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 03 2024