When it comes to keyboards, you can usually divide people up into two categories1: those who don't think about keyboards very much, and those that think about their keyboards a lot.
If you aren't already in the sphere of keyboard enthusiasts and you decide to dive in2, you're going to find more information than you ever dreamed that anyone would know or want to know about keyboards. Almost none of which I'm going to go into here.
But assuming you do dive into the World of Keyboards™, you're going to eventually find someone talking about the Model M keyboard. The Model M is a gigantic thing, with a steel plate in it that you could use to defend yourself from a charging creature of any size up to a small deer and still type afterward without breaking a sweat3.
I own a few Model M keyboards, and they definitely live up to the hype for me. They're big, yeah, and they sound like a machine gun going off when you really get going on the thing. They're good for letting everyone in a 200 foot radius that, yes, you are typing and you probably don't want to be bothered.
I exclusively used Model M keyboards for my computing for a long time, too. I got a couple for free from friends or dumpster-dives, so the price was definitely right. And the keyboards are easy to clean, so the dumpster-dove one was fine to use after a thorough scrubdown. I just loved the feel and the sound of the things. The Geek Cred™ didn't really enter into it because I mostly used them in my home office where the only witnesses to the clickety-clacking was a cat4
After several years of using my Model M, it wasn't getting tired and worn out, exactly, but I was getting tired using it. I still enjoyed using the thing, but I realized after lengthy typing sessions that I just felt physically tired after using it. The keys take significant effort to push down, and it was enough that I could actually feel tired at the end of the day if I typed a lot for whatever reason. So I started looking at replacements.
I knew I didn't want a cheap rubber-dome keyboard, since the gurus on all the hottest keyboard-enthusiast sites told me was the equivalent of typing on solidified beluga whale vomit, so I chose the Happy Hacking Lite 2. I got the cheaper version which had... rubber domes. It was nice, but since the keyboard was missing so many keys, you had to go through some pretty extreme finger contortions to activate the special keys. And if you wanted to activate special key combinations, then I feel bad for you.
After using that for a while, I decided to switch to other keyboards to see what the hubbub was all about. I would get a new keyboard after a year or so with the old one and try it out. They're expensive, but if you only buy them once a year or so, the hit to your wallet doesn't feel so bad. But a couple of Das Keyboards here and a Ducky One there, and a couple of FC660Cs over there, not only do you start to realize that keyboards take up a lot of room when you're not using them, and you're also spending around $10 - $20 a month on keyboards if you amortize it out for some reason.
I kept keyboard hopping for a couple of reasons. I keep looking for that one perfect keyboard. In the one perfect size with the perfect keyfeel that will take me to Typing Nirvana™. I haven't found that. No matter how nice a keyboard feels to type on, I tend to want to change it up about a year later. Partly because the newness of the feel of the keys usually wears off by then, but also because I ruined one of my keyboards by spilling garlic butter in it5.
But I also realized that I hadn't used a Model M proper in around eight years. And with this 'new' Model M, the keyboard that I used for several years before that, is it time to go back to it? Or, to a new model of it?
No, not really. I didn't like being tired after using the old keyboard. And, even though these tenkeyless and 60% keyboards make me have to do some bizarre finger contortions when I need to activate some of the more esoteric key combinations like, say, Print Screen. But that's a small price to pay for the amount of room I save on my desk.
Although... I haven't bought a new keyboard in about nine months...