NZXT PODCAST - #178 - New Function 2 and Lift 2! (Ft. Jason)

Episode Date: February 24, 2024

On this week's episode of the NZXT Podcast... We have our Director of Product Management, Jason, joining us to talk about our new Function 2 keyboards and Lift 2 mice! Catch the replay at twitch.tv/NZXT!

Hello, everyone, and welcome to episode 178 of the NCC podcast, the official podcast of the NZC community. This podcast is recorded live every other Friday at 10 a.m. Pacific, Sanctime, on the official NCC Twitch. It is available to stream on Apple Podcast, Spotify, and SoundCloud. My name is Mike. And with me, as always, is Ivan. How are you doing, Ivan? I'm doing great, Mike. Happy to be here for episode number 178.

I can't believe we've been doing this for this long. And today's going to be a special episode. We have a very special guest. We also have some interesting stuff to talk about. But before we get into that, I want to make two quick announcements. If you are tuned in live right now on Twitch.tv slash nzxte. We are doing our usual poochy plush mascot giveaway. So you can win one of these furry little guys here

and put them next to your PC like me. Keeps you company while you're playing video games and whatnot. And then the other announcement I want to make is that if you are tuned in live, you also are going to get early access to our function to and lift to giveaway, which will be announced later today. And if you stick around to the end of the show, you will get a secret word, which is going to get you a bunch of bonus entries into that giveaway. And for those that don't know, the function to and lift two are a brand new keyboard and mouse. And with that, I want to introduce our special guest here. Jason, welcome to the show. How are

you. Doing well. Thanks. Thanks for having me. Excited to talk about the new products we launched a couple days ago and give everybody some information, add a little more context, and just talk keyboards and mice. Been living it for a long time now and I love doing things like this. Yeah, congratulations on the new product launch. I know you've been working extra hard, extra long on this, and we're excited to spread the word on social media about it. For those that don't know who you are and what you do, Can you talk a little bit about what you do at NZXT? Yeah, so I am the director of product management. So I manage a team of product managers, and we work on all of our gaming gear products.

I think, you know, I've been within this industry developing products for a long time, big CS2 player myself. So it's an exciting, be able to bring new products to the market and work with the team that we have here. so I'm really pumped about talking about keyboards and mice today. Awesome. So before we start talking about that stuff, Mike, can you roll the clip? Yeah, right back. All righty.

I love that commercial. We should have ran that during the Super Bowl. Pay all that money for one of the Super Bowl commercials. I'm down. So we just have the function two and the Lyft too. So Jason, do you want to go into the, you know, specific of what the function 2 and the Lyft 2 have? Yeah, I mean, I could just a general overview if that's cool.

So, yeah, a couple of days ago, we launched Function 2, which is the evolution of our current function keyboard line. So the new releases are available in full size and mini-TKL, which is our consolidated TKL version to a little bit smaller footprint, but you still get all the same keys as a TKL. So if you're playing certain games like Battlefield, which a lot of the preset binds are on the F-road keys, you still have those without missing out if you went to, you know, say a, you know, it's like a 60% keyboard. So, you know, that's one of the big advantages of going to mini T-Cal. That's the size I personally use because of the smaller form factor, turning the keyboard sideways and then having access to the top function keys.

So, you know, wholesale changes under the hood of the keyboards compared to the previous version. A lot of focus, I'm sure we'll get into around performance and also improving the typing feel. So they may look a similar other than the white one having white key caps now, but under the hood, inside, completely brand new, completely revamp on the keyboards. And then also you could say that the same thing for the mice. You know, there's a couple of key targets for the mice we wanted to focus in on, and that was reducing the weight of the product. So we did sacrifice the RGB that was in there previously, but we're able to reduce the weight quite a bit. You know, for instance, the original function mouse was 67 grams, and the new version of what we call lift to, sorry, Lyft to Sim is 58 grams now. So nine grams of weight reduction.

Again, complete under the hood upgrade from the performance aspect of the mice as well. And then we launched two different versions. We have a symmetrical version along with an ergonomic version. So depending on your grip style, how you play, you can select what feels most comfortable to you, but you still get the same performance on either of the mice there. So yeah, that's kind of the gist in the overview of both products that we launched. Awesome. So I want to go a little bit into like, so we have the function one and the lift one. So what was like kind of the internal revamp to go from the function one to the now function two and a lift two?

Sure. Yeah. I think the first thing, right, is that this, you know, the function one and the lift one was our first launch in gaming gear. You know, our introductory type products. And, you know, we, we. We knew that we were going to have growing pains. And once we launched, we knew we were going to get a lot of feedback positive and negative directly from social media, people emailing us, our customer support team. So what we wanted to do is kind of compile that information and make a lot of changes based on that as we evolve to our next generation. I don't think if we're not evolving, if you're not listening, what are you been doing here, right?

So we took a lot of the feedback we got and to make, you know, enhancements to it. So it's like, okay, ABS key caps on the previous one, you know, okay, we got to move that to PBT keycaps. Okay, you know, I want more of an all white type mouse, you know, a little less accents with the black key caps. Okay, let's let's do that. And then we heard feedback about some performance aspects of it as well. And so we wanted to upgrade that to optical switches on, you know, both the mice and the keyboard. So just a lot of, and then the typing fill, I think, was huge on the keyboard, right? And one of the functions of moving to Gen 2 was to improve the typing feel.

So making sure that, you know, we enhanced the pre-lubrication process. We worked on custom stabilizers for this keyboard. we worked on the space bar and all the modifier keys to make sure they rattle less. So just really work to overhaul the complete fill. If you had experience on function one and you moved to function two, you're going to see quite a bit of a difference between the two keyboards. You're going to see the NZXT kind of evolution as we move to our second, third, fourth, fifth, for the next 10 years, we'll continue to evolve.

And I love that you mention. that you listen to feedback because, you know, one of the things Mike and I like to do on social is not just have fun. We do like to share a lot of the feedback that we get about our products, not just keyboards and mice, but with keyboards and mice in particular when we launched them two years ago, I was not expecting the amount of feedback we got about those products, to be honest. It was a lot of feedback. And like you said, we listened, we improved both the keyboard and the Miles. And I think you and the product team did an amazing job, not just addressing the concerns people had about the first gen, but also making really great improvements overall. And one of those

improvements that I want to get into is this eight times faster polling rate. How do you, yeah, how do you expect those, these new polling rates to impact the user experience and performance? Yeah. So polling rate is, you know, there was always, you know, we were capped out at, you know, 1K pulling rate on input devices for a long, long time. And, you know, you even had, I remember, you know, back when I was playing CS1.6 and even before that, there were all these different, you know, philosophies if I should play at 500 hertz polling rate, should I go up to 1K, could I jump around? I think, you know, what we've seen happen recently is as graphic power increase, along with higher refresh monitors,

it's becoming increasingly important that you use a mouse that has higher refresh rate. And we can talk a little bit. I'll talk a little bit later about system latency pipeline with Nvidia and the end-to-end response time. But it's become really crucial that, you know, if you have, for instance, a, you know, I game sometimes on, you know, really high refresh monitors,

you know, either at 500 hertz or 540 hertz or 240 hertz. It's going to be really crucial to match that up with a mouse and a pulling rate that you feel comfortable with. So you're getting that kind of one-to-one and you're not missing out on the latency of using a higher-performing monitor. That's a lot of fancy, fancy stuff on like, did you take notes? Yes, I am actually doing that right now. Good. Regarding the keyboards in particular, apart from the polling rate, we also now have optical switches and adjustable actuation. Can you explain a little bit how that makes these keyboards unique in the current keyboard market?

Yeah, I mean, that was one of our major upgrades from function one to function two, is going from your traditional mechanical switch that has been out for 30 plus years. And seeing this trend of more keyboards, especially in the price point where we launched function 2N, is moving to optical switches and getting that benefit of an optical switch. And some of the big benefits, right, are faster response time because instead of a mechanical design with a switch and you're moving through a gold plated contact point where you have debounce time, you have debounce time, you have some kind of. of resistance, basically your force curve going down and coming up is going to be different. So all those things led to like optical, and that's why you're seeing more and more keywords come with optical switches. It's because you can make performance enhancements on your traditional switch from, you know, like I said, debounce timing, force curve, you know, response time. It's all greater with an optical switch. Generally longevity as well, you know, with 100 million

plus ratings on optical switches because again you don't have that gold contact point. So the fluidity of these switches is a lot greater. And then the other part of that is because the stem of the switch is breaking a optical light that's on the PCB, you're able to do, we were able to figure out items like how to do adjustable actuation with an optical switch and how to make it extremely accurate. You know, you're going to see more of this from NZT and our evolution of our products is speccing correctly, giving real numbers. And also, you know, that's kind of our secret sauce of engineering. And I'll share a little bit of kind of what we do, you know, on the optical switch that gives us a rock solid rating of one millimeter actuation for that first setting and 1.5.

And a lot of that had to come with our collaboration with Gatoron. So when we talked about the Swift optical switch, not only do you see the stem color being purple on the keyboard, I'll hold it up as well. You'll see our default stem color is purple here. That stem color is specifically mixed with a high-performance resin to get the exact color and transparency we need. To be able to, when you break the optical light, you're getting basically the best readings possible for your actuation point. So for instance, on our function two keyboard, you know, we rate it as 1.0 and 1.5. And then there's, of course, there's a margin of air when you're, you know, when you're doing anything, you know, with mechanical. But it's about, you know, making sure those tolerances are extremely tight.

So our keyboard, like when we say 1.0, we have a margin of air of 1 tenth of a millimeter. So you know you're going to get highly accurate actuation at 1.0. and you're going to get highly accurate actuation on 1.5. Some of these, you know, I know a lot of people reference to me some websites that are actually doing this testing now, like ratings. They do a number of optical magnetic adjustment and they test the values is we've like we've spent a lot of time perfecting our switch to make sure our values are accurate. And when we look at, you know, we did, you know, of course we did our homework and see, okay, how can we better than what the competitors are doing? And some of those switches on there that they have these ultra wide range of actuation points that if you actually measure them with a device to see what it actually actuates that, it's not 1.0 or it's not really too close to it.

So we spent a lot of time perfecting that switch to make sure we have really accurate settings. And why that matters is because we want the consistency through the keyboard. If you get used to hovering on an actuation point at 1.1 or 1.0 across a full keyboard, we want to have to have to. that same consistency, press after press, month after month, year after year, basically there. So a lot of little small things go into these keyboards and this kind of evolution we made on function too. Yeah, and how do you think all those little small things that you pointed out address things like lag, latency, and even like customization limitations for keyboard users? Yeah.

They definitely help, right? Because any, you know, there's a number of components of its polling rate, your key scanning, your actuation point. All those things add up to then your end-to-end or your system latency pipeline will be a lot faster. So we kind of look at all those different points and try to optimize based on that to increase the performance of the keyboard. The mice is where it gets really interesting because we do have, you know, you do have NVDA and what they do with the LDAT testing. that really allows you to, you know, performance-tune these input devices to be as fast as possible for performance. Yeah, you mentioned the mice. We'll get into the mice in a minute, but before we should get there,

I do want to know, like, what was the rationale behind, including both pre-lubricated switches and plate-mounted stabilizers in the function, too? Yeah, so, you know, a lot of the feel of the switch, like, comes from the lubrication. Sometimes switches or there's not enough lubrication. Sometimes you open it up and it looks like someone just poured a whole bucket of lubrication in these things. So adjusting that, how you want it to feel and how you want to do it. And of course, you know, keyboard enthusiasts who will actually lubricate themselves, you know, you know, will be able to, you know, in real time, adjust that lubrication or feel.

But we have to do it in mass production. So we spend a lot of time to make sure our tolerances are really great. on the field of lubrication. And then the stabilizers are key of what we do there and some of the mods we do to make sure that, you know, the typing experience feels really, really good. Especially when you're using like really lightweight linear switches, it can be a challenge. But, you know, if you were able to see these keyboard side by side from our Gen 1 to Gen 2, the evolution is, you know, you'll notice it right away when you start typing that, you know, the acoustics is a little bit better. The feel, the crispness is a little bit better, just all around, you know, nice, nice enhancements that our engineering team were able to provide the keyboard. Yeah, definitely sounds and feels a lot better than Gen 1.

And I'm still using Gen 1 right now myself, actually, because the Gen 2 that I got was a Mini TKL, and I'm a full-size guy. But I'm just curious, like, you personally, I know you're a Mini TKL guy. So what advantages does the mini Tiki AL form factor have for people? Yeah. So, yeah, this is my exact keyboard. I took it. It's not plugged in right now, obviously, and I have the switches. But I think the main advantage, there's a couple things.

We talked about it in the opening about, you know, this function row here. So you have access to these keys that sometimes are the pre-vines in, you know, certain games that are. are set there by default. So you don't lose those by going to a small form factor keyboard, which the main reason why is just space saving. But not that, you know, you're using an old school keyboard tray and things like that. It's more of, you know, you see a lot of players. They turn their keyboards as they played, give them better leverage on the WASD.

You know, monitors. It's like, you know, with our canvas monitors, we designed the base of it to be as small as possible because people pull their monitors right as close as possible and sometimes want to line the monitor stand with the keyboard because they turn it so just giving that flexibility there of how they want it to be set up and then also i think about um you know when i play and i've heard uh you know and we take this into consideration is that when you're um when you're using uh you know the the keyboard um it actually brings in your your shoulder um it actually brings in your shoulder in a more natural position.

And so your mouse and your your your W-A-S-D as you're on it is a little bit more natural rather than spacing out like this. This leads to better comfort and better perform sometimes with a full-size keyboard either. But then again, full-size right? Just a good performance. And if you, you know, you need the 10 keypad because you're used to it. Trust me, it was I had a learning curve, right? You start reaching for it constantly, especially if you're, you know, you're doing other things, you know, work or, etc, but you know, you kind of program yourself to not use the 10 keypad as much as before.

I keep buying all my hacks on that number pad, so I kind of need it on playing a CSCO. Got to turn to Walhawk real quick. All right. So you should play so you can help me rank up faster then. So yeah, we can ride you? Okay. No, we won't do that. No. I'll report you for sure. So you're talking about a lot of like the quality of the keyboard itself. and throughout the production of it. The keyboard has an aluminum frame, right? So how does that, like, relate in terms of, like, quality in terms of keyboards? Yeah, I mean, you really want to have a, you know, you know, I was like, you know, pick it up.

You kind of do the, you know, the old school flex test because, you know, you really don't want to have that rubber dome keyboard where you can almost bend it all the way, right? You know, you're not going to have something with great quality there. But, you know, you need the switches mounted on a plate to make sure you have a stable platform. And, you know, you don't want individual switches going in further or bending or stuff like that. So you want to really stable plate. Most top plates are not as thick as what's on the function to keyboard. So we put a little bit more thicker top plate on there to really give you a solid base or more solid base for typing. And he also added a sound, sound debiting.

foam or something like that, correct? To the keyboard? Yeah. So it has two layers of sound happening foam. And also we did a tape-enhanced PCB, so or known as like the tape mod, you know, in the keyboard community. Just to help, you know, dampen some of the key presses, it does have an effect on acoustic slightly and feel.

But most, you know, everybody interprets sound differently and feel. and feel differently. So one person may say, well, okay, the foam in there makes it, it dampens it, or someone says that it makes it louder. It's all what your personal, you know, characteristics and feel are when you hear things and see things as well. So like typing sound, you know, I always say like put on a headset, blast music, and type on a keyboard and then do it without the headset, you know, sometimes it feels better

to type on it either one way or the other. So there's all these acoustic properties and feel that we take into consideration and fine-tune to make sure we're like hitting a nice plane where the typing experience is enhanced as well. Someone pointed out that the keyboard, as you type on it, sounds like Legos. And I think that right there is a huge selling point for those out there that are looking for a good sounding keyboard. I was going to say, is that good or bad? It's a great sound.

Because if you ever played like the Lego Star Wars games, people are striving to like get keyboards to sound like that because it's just, one, it's nostalgic, but two, it sounds crisp but not like clicky. It's like right in the middle. It's not super quickly, but also not like dampen. A Lego sound, like when you build Legos and you crush it and it falls on the ground, that's the sound that a lot of people love. And I think right there you should make sure to tell people that because someone pointed out to

me in a in a TikTok comment and I went oh my god that is amazing because I love the sound on it and that's that's one of my favorite parts I'm gonna have to start using that because you know as we mentioned kind of earlier on we're always evolving too so I'm gonna I'm gonna we'll tell some of our engineers who are working on next gen like Lego like mimic Lego every one of those Legos I mean PC builders you know yeah building PCs basically just a build Lego so that's that's just I like it I like it a lot that's cool so let's transition over to the to the lift so uh so the lift has two different things there's a 58 gram and a 61 gram so what's what what can like gamers specifically like see or feel in the performance

of with this really lightweight mice yeah yeah i think the first thing is we just wanted to give people two options right um you know there's a lot of symmetrical mice out there there's lot of ergonomic mice out there. And depending on your grip style and how you hold the mouse, even what games you play, you may prefer one or the other. You know, for instance, like myself, I use, you know, I use the Lyft 2 ergo mouse because I'm a little bit more of a claw gripper or like a hybrid grip from palm to claw. So I feel like that one allows me to have better grip. I know a lot of you know, we have a lot, you know, there's probably a lot of you out there that prefer symmetrical mice because you're a little bit more of a pinch gripper. And then like I said, it depends on what games do you play like and what, you know, do you lift the mouse constantly and pick it up and put it down?

You know, are you playing maybe league where it's a little bit less pickup, MMO where there's not a whole lot of pickup? And you may still pick it up. But just giving people the options to, okay, I love the performance. I love what NZXT is doing on the click latency, you know, extremely fast. I love what they're doing on the weight. But hey, maybe, you know, I'm like Jason and I need something a little bit more of a claw hybrid type grip. But we only offer symmetrical. So we want to make sure we cover as many kind of grip styles as possible with the two different options.

And they do weigh different because the mouse, you know, because the ergo is a little bit bigger because of the shape and how it conquers. That's where you see that, you know, it's about three grams heavier because of the mouse. of that, but it's still, you know, 58 and 61 grams, as you mentioned. Oh, wow. Okay, so with this weight difference, um, I guess for me, like, I'm thinking,

how does this affect me, like having a lightweight mass? Does, have you seen like gamers specifically, like, having, um, like noticing a difference in terms of, like, gaming for long periods of time?

Because I, I know a lot of people here probably game, you know, couple hours straight without stopping. Uh, does lightweight feel affect that? in any sort of way? Yeah, for sure.

I mean, if you're playing, you know, if you're playing a high-paced, fast FPS shooter, where you may be playing, let's just say, with, you know,

400 DPI, along with maybe a 1.8 sensitivity rating in game, you're basically picking up the mouse and putting it back down for almost every single move you're making. And that, you know,

that can get, that could get tiring. If you're using, like a mouse that's 120 grams, you know, you'll notice it. I mean, you may build up some wrist strength over time and, you know, it's almost like, you know, going to the gym and working out and things like that there. But yeah, you'll definitely notice it. And also if you're younger as well, maybe, you know, you're, you know, 12, 13 years old and you're still developing, you know, into an adult, you know, something a little bit lighter weight could help you as well.

There are certain games or certain mice that you really don't need lightweight. You know, it could be a world to work app. You may prefer because you don't pick it up. You're okay with a mouse. That's 120 plus grams. Well, it's personal preference, but there's a, you know, there's a fatigue area about it and a confidence to it as well using the lightweight mouse. And there's this, the sensor, I got to read it.

It's Pixar. 3395 sensor. Can you go a little bit into the specifics of what the sensor is and how, like, special it is? Yeah, so it's the best available sensor that we have access to from Pixar. Pixar's like a legendary company, and they used to be a Vago sensors back in the day, and then the company's merged and were called Pixar. So they're basically the premier standard for, you know, for sensors. And we use, you know, we use them exclusively for all of our mice or these two mice.

So it's 2,600, you know, DPI and 2,600 is, you know, it's a big number. Most people will never get close to it, even if you had like, you know, four 8K monitor setups. But more importantly, there's some cool features in there at lower DPIs that give you, you know, great tracking on the screen to make it more kind of that one-to-one. visual for your movement to your screenplay. But really, you know, optical sensor,

the gold standard in sensors and want to make sure we put the highest performing one in there, you know, with the inches per second being 650 as well. You hear that, Mike. I think you just challenge you. You need a 4-8K monitor set up. See if you can actually put that sensor to

use. Oh, dude, I would totally use that if I could. Just all my monitors. I would play, if I could, I would do like the ultra big screen or ultra wide screen. Like, you know, like the 180 degree version like monitors where you literally can just look to your left and see. That would be disgusting. I would love to see you have like, use a mouse that's like 130 grams and also 400 DPI with that setup. You'll get tired, I guarantee.

Your whole desk will be in the mouse and see you're like kind of wrap it around. God. And I am, I am an arm aimer too. Like here, you can see people here. I have a, I have a 400,800 DPI in my Mac and my setting. So, like, I am an arm aimer, which I think everyone here should transition if you are a first-person shooter guy. Yeah. Because if you don't, you will, doing wrist aiming, after a while, we'll get you some really bad.

It can lead carpal tunnel if you do it for long periods of time. But seriously, switch over to arm aiming. Slower, uh, sensitivities. use your arm more, it'll help out in long run. Trust me. You can always spot the wrist aimers because they have that like black circle right here. Yeah. The mouse pad, yeah.

You have that? No, I don't have that. I have one here, though. I have a line here because that's where the end of my mouse pad is. And that's where I rest my arm when I eat this. So I have a line right here. I felt too, like with what the art, like talking about aiming like you or movement, like you said, it allows you to like program your your mind.

for the muscle memory as well so you can you know you know okay if i move at this amount of distance it's going to move this amount of my screen and for me at least it just feels more repeatable than trying to do it with with your wrist hey just everyone has their preferences but i'm just saying arm aiming's better uh so we're going to go kind of into like the so we have these new keyboards and these new mice um so like can you share like about the insights of when you were marketing or figuring out these keyboards and mice, like how this product was going to go against other brands that, you know, have already been here for years since we're entering into the market very new, very recently. Can you share some of those insights?

Yeah, I mean, like we just, we, we compile as much data as we can. I mean, you can even see over my folder, right? I have basically, you know, a lot of different keyboards, a lot of different mice and our product teams have those, along with our engineering teams all over the world. We're constantly breaking down, evaluating competitor products. We're constantly evaluating emerging technologies as well from different manufacturers. Even having a technology roadmap of ourselves where we develop concept and ideas, even if it's not something associated with a specific project, we could be. actively working on.

So, you know, and then of course, you know, we're doing, you know, we're, you know, we're looking at all the social media comments. You know, we're looking at, you know, TikTok, X, Reddit, even though that could be a challenge sometimes to look at. But, you know, we're just trying to get as much information, you know, where we're going to gaming shows and talking to thousands of people of kind of what they're looking at, what their preference on. And then we're trying to spot like, hey, what's the, what's the evolution for this specific, for these specific categories? And how can we bring, you know, new and new and exciting products out there? I always like say as well, like, we talked a little bit earlier about developing products. But also, and one of the feedback I get is, you know, we're all in, I think most of us, right, we're in group chats with other friends. If it's on Discord, if it's on, if it's on, um,

WhatsApp, if it's on Telegram, things like that. And I have those same friends, and we're going to want to develop really cool products because your friends are using it as well. So you kind of take that friend mentality and you expand that to everybody and you just try to get all the feedback and put it into new products. What do you think the main challenges are of positioning NST as a credible player in this you know, really saturated gaming keyboard and mouse market. I think it's going to take to, you know, we're going to have to do a lot of education on

more of the technical side of things. Like, you know, I mentioned on the keyboards, right, with the actuation points of, you know, those true actuation points. Like, if you buy a keyboard for NST, you know, we want to make sure we can prove to you and, you know, you have the confidence in us that if we say 1.0 millimeter actuator. with the margin of error of one tenth, that's exactly what you're going to get. If we, you know, if we say on for instance, Lyft 2 and we do LDAT testing and our mouse latency is 0.1 milliseconds and our end-to-end latency is 11.5 milliseconds, which is, you know, some of the best, if not the best speed you can buy of any mouse on the market.

It's just making sure that we kind of get that through. and communicate and make sure it's easy to understand because we want to, you know, I think it really comes from what we've done from coolers and what we've done from cases and things like that, always kind of pushing the envelope, but being extremely honest and making sure we're as transparent as possible, and we're going to continue to do that on, you know, these new categories. And I think that's really important to us at NSXT. Awesome. Love to hear that. And I do see that we have some community questions that I do want to ask you. But before we get to those, I want to ask you, you know, what sort of future innovations can NZXT fans expect in the keyboard and mouse categories now that we've launched Function 2 and Live 2? Obviously, you don't want to reveal any secrets, but what do you think people can expect?

Yeah. That's always a fun. question to answer because you know I don't think a lot of people realize like when you you know when we as a team launch the function to and lift to we're already well in development of kind of next generation or in the ideation phase of what could be next and sometimes we don't want to share because it's wild ideas things like that but I think goes back kind of what we've been talking about you know for for this conversation is the the evolution And I think it's, you know, I think without being said, is continue to involve the, the build quality of keyboards, you know, bringing that up where maybe we do our own unique items and tooling for various aspects to be able to. And sorry, I know, I'm given like an intentionally vague answer as well. So I understand that I'm doing it. Is that, you know, we're going to involve like build quality and feel and we're going to involve performance of our products as well. And, you know, I saw a lot of questions. when it came with like, hey, you know, optical's cool, but what about Hall effect and those type of keyboards as well? And I say, like, hey, we're evaluating that. But again, when I talk about the accuracy of the switches, that's something that if we come out with something like that, we want to make sure we're getting the best ratings possible as far as our technical specifications, and we can be as dialed in and locked in as possible.

So we'll look at everything. You know, I own almost, you know, and our team, we have a lot of keyboards and mice that we look at and evaluate and all the emerging tech, too. Cool. You hear that, people? I guess things will just keep getting better and better as time goes on. All right. So community questions now. First one is from Fliskin.

They ask, what does the NZXT key do? So it can do anything you want. So it's fully programmable. So if you want it to, you know, if you want to set it to exit your game, if you want to set it to rebind your enter key, it's just because of the format and how we have, it's just an extra key that we're making, that is made fully programmable in the CAM software.

I'll show it off real quick for those in those that are watching live. If you have our cam, there's a thing where you can do rematch. So this is like the regular lighting one. You can actually go ahead and go to remap keys. And then from here, you can literally remap any key here. But I'll try to find the NXT one somewhere here. I can search it actually. Here it is.

And from here, you can actually change it to whatever you want. You can change it to. Well, I have mine as mute and unmute on Discord because I use that button all the time. So I literally just, if I want to mute myself, I just click it, done. And I just unmute myself after. Really cool. That's smart, actually. Should do that.

Yeah, that's a good one. Next question from Idol 404. Any plans to make purple-colored peripherals? Not yet, no. Question from TTC Beppo. Any chance of the mouse going wireless at some point? Which I think that's a great question because we have received that question a million times, Not just about the mouse, but the keyboard as well.

So what do you think about wireless, Jason? Yeah, absolutely. We have to launch wireless mouse, and we will launch wireless mouse. I mean, it's just the evolution, right? You know, as we're cracking in with these ones and, you know, establishing ourselves as high performance, you know, around $50, the next step is, you know, to go into wireless. So safe to tune on that.

Speaking of wireless, not related to, keyboards here, but Lila is true is asking, are there plans for a wireless version of relay? I think the same answer is like the evolution is wireless and, you know, once

we start getting into, you know, above kind of the mid-range and we have to go wireless, so, you know, we're still committed to expanding our lines of deeming peripherals. So absolutely, we're going to get into wireless all around. Nice.

All right. Last question from the community before we get into my favorite part of the show, which is Mike's silly questions. From Saracha Zilla, my favorite username of the day. Will there be coiled keyboard cables? We do not have plans for coiled keyboard cables right now. I do think there is, you know, there's a lot of great options out there to buy them from, you know, certain third party manufacturing. that kind of give you a ton of options. I personally love coil cables, right?

But there's just so many things like, I mean, you probably know, there's so many things you can do with, you know, the aviator coils and the connections. And then do you need type C to type C, USBC to type A, you know, colors, you know, where is the aviator on the different parts of the coil? Is it in between the coil and the PC? There's all these different options, and people have all these different preferences.

So I think for now we're just going to stay clear about it. But it's something that if there's enough people, obviously, that want to transition or look at coil cables, will definitely look at it for sure. That's awesome. All right, Mike, it's your turn to throw in some questions out there. All righty. So let's go ahead and get into some rapid fire questions.

So this is gonna be some answer however you want you can go in depth if you want don't have to don't even worry about it Actually this is from the chat, but this is actually a great rapid fire question to start off with from Iconite or iconite How did you guys get into the industry? So how did you get into this? The role Jason I think first and foremost is just Being a PC gamer and just the passionate I had for for playing CounterStrike.

I still remember the first time I played CounterStrike was out of friends' house. And this was right when CounterStrike 1.0 came out. And we were playing on like one of those old, you know, they look like relics now, right? If you look back in movies and stuff, like Compact Computer. And I remember playing it for the first time. It just got hooked and I've been playing it ever since.

And I got extremely lucky to be able to be able to. to enter this industry about 12 years ago developing products for keyboards and mice. And, you know, it's just so fun kind of making products that you use, your friends use, making other people, you know, escape from whatever could be going on in their daily life to be able to game and then some people to even make a living at it. You know, but it started with that first time I played Counterstrike. I got hooked in this industry and it just became an evolution to start helping develop products too. And I guess we'll go straight into the CS questions.

What is your favorite item or inventory item you have in CS? Ooh. I still love my cult that is a hyper-beast skin. that's probably one of the skins I've had the longest stat track as well that's probably that's probably my favorite favorite weapon I have

I've always wanted to have a fade knife but I can't justify spending the prices to get one of those but yeah I would say my HyperBist skins my Neo-NoWR AWP stat tracking skin is probably one of my one of my favorites to use

and then I would say on the on the terrorist side I love my neon rider AK 47 stat track that's that's probably those are probably my two favorite the neon rider

AK and then for the M4 1S is the hyper B skin and then the follow up question AK or the M4 which one do you prefer

well i mean okay yeah okay yeah for sure i was hoping that you'd be a little controversial be like oh i like them for you know well i mean i if anybody watched uh you know the last uh the last c s2 tournament where uh of course there was all the hype around donk right if we if everybody was involved in the donk mania is uh i think there was one place where his teammate dropped in a wp you know donk was dead dropped in a w p to up an AK just so we can give the AK to don't because you were just going to go off with it.

Wow. Which is like, you know, you don't see that, right? That's kind of crazy that you would purposely drop an AWP going into the next round just to grab an AK. So it shows you where I'm at on that weapon because that's probably a good choice there. And speaking of gaming, give me the top five favorite games of all time. Top five, Counter strike, one. Battlefield 2, or Battlefield 2, actually, that's my favorite version of Battlefield there.

I like Ballarat as well. It really drops up. I really don't play too much because I've just been sucked into CS2 for a long, long time. Had fun for a while playing Fortnite and League. And then I'll say Dota 2, 5th. All righty. All right, so fun, random ones.

If you, oh, if you can only eat one food for the rest of her life, it had to be dessert, what would it be? From Burlet. Ooh. He had that answer on deck. Dang, I like that one. Ooh, that's fancy.

I like that. Yeah. What is the word? If it's on the menu, you've got to order it, like, as a dessert. Have you ever made from the ways? No, I don't want to screw it up. So hard to make. But Costco ones are pretty good too

Like you know Costco's got some of that stuff dialed in right And they have some that you can get That are that are pretty good for kind of you know Pre-made but in a restaurant's the best way to do it Homemade What is the worst piece of vice that you've ever been given Wow

Like don't fail Very true very true Especially in product You're going to have to deal with failure all the time, but then, you know, eventually it works out. Yep, exactly. What is your most useless talent? My most useless talent. Nothing jumps up at me.

Most useless talent. You could eat an entire frame brule in one bite. Yeah. Yeah, you definitely get sick if you do that. Let's see If you could be If you could be instantly An expert on anything in the world

What would that one thing be? Dog training I need that for her Yeah I have two dogs And there's a yeah It's always a learning process And you have to be so disciplined With the training

And it's fun But it's a lot of discipline and a lot of hard work. How old are your dogs? Three and six. And what are their names? Elsa and Ariel. Oh, I love those names.

I love those names. Big German Shepherds, so don't get any ideas anybody. Oh, here it is. What would you rather fight one horse-sized duck or a hundred horse size or a hundred duck-sized horses? The one. the one horse size duck yeah

yeah yeah oh black I don't know man ducks are ruthless I've been attacked my ducks before they're just

you know I just want one good clean hit and you win right like rather than just being exhausted and then boom that's that's no way to go I've I'm thinking like battle royale to the death

right so yeah I'd rather have one shot I don't know, man I don't know because those ducks Those those teeth on ducks man I got bit by a duck on my ankle They're ruthless man They're sharp Yeah ducks can be territorial

Like I used to go fishing Back where I grew up And yeah there would be like ducks in the lake And They don't like sometimes when you're By their territory or whatever The duck bill is called or whatever All right we got two more

You're a villain. What would your evil master plan be to take over the world? Wow. Crembleau has to be every meal. Like, it's the only thing ever manufactured and was high in protein, and that's all you could. Oh, and maybe you control it, like you control the supply or something like that. Oh, supply, yeah. Turn it into a pill.

Everyone had to take every day. Yeah, that would be good. Then the final one. Would you rather have fingers as long as your legs or legs as long as your fingers? Let's go legs. Legs as long as your fingers. Ooh. You just be scurterling around.

That way you can still use his keyboard and mouse, right? Yeah, exactly. That is true. You still play. That's true. And I'm sure we'll come up with some technology that, you know, gets you around in a, you know, I mean, with A. and, you know, some of the robotic stuff, right? Like, there's

ways to figure it out. That's very true. Welcome, Pauline, to a great, it's a great time you join. All righty, I think that's it on the rapid fire. Do you have anything you'd want to tell the community

before we go to the announcements? Yeah, just, I guess I'll just say, thanks for everybody for joining, check us out. It's always fun to talk shop, talk product, and there's more to come from NST, awesome team, working on everything, and we're

excited about the future. And, you know, we have some of the best, if not the best. Of course, I'm biased, you know, cases and coolers and power supplies and mobos. And, you know, peripherals and gaming gear is next. So it's going to be exciting if you're along for the ride

for the foreseeable future with us. So thank you. Yeah. Thanks for joining us on the podcast. It's always fun to hear like the technical side because you know me and Ivan we know we know like the funny baseline stuff but when we actually hear about the technical stuff or like oh wow it's actually very interesting to learn.

Yep. All righty. So let me go to a couple of announcements and then for those that are here I'll give you guys the code word for the giveaways. So first like Jason's been talking about the entire time, we just launched our brand new function two keyboards.

They're available in their, available in black or white and in full size or mini TKL. They are equipped with linear optical switches. I actually have one of the switches right now. An 8K Hertz polling rate, which is pretty much the fastest on the market right now. Adjustable actuation and hot swappable keys, since that was a huge thing that people wanted. If you guys want to take a look at nzixc.com or type Esclamation point function 2 in the chat.

And again, we also just released some Lyft 2 mites. Also available in black or white. You can choose between the ergo for the right-handed folks. And then SIM, if you have a different grip style or you just, you know, want just a simple standard symmetrical sim, symmetrical form. They have an 8Khertz polling rate and a 26,000 DPI sensor. So you can go ahead and just click head. and destroy people like Jason does at CS.

And again, nzixi.com or Esclamation point Lift 2 in the chat. And you guys take up the link there. Oh, yeah, we also just released our brand new crop project. We have a mouse, mouse pad and case, case and PC, inspired by the game Starfield. So honestly, the case is pretty awesome. It's in our H5 flow. It's looked dope. love the color scheme with the white, red, and blue.

I just love the color scene in general. And if you're looking for a new PC with a new case, you guys have to take a look at the Player 2Capt Edition PC. So take a look at nzc.com again, or estimation point start field if you're into chat right now. We're doing weekly giveaways on the Discord. Join the Discord community. The Discord is awesome.

Lots of lovely people there. So Discord GG slash NCXT. and join our awesome community and check take a look at the giveaways channel because we're doing giveaways pretty much weekly and again as Jason said

we're releasing everything we got new keyboards we got new mice we're getting new cases we're getting fans we got monitors we got everything you can think of soon we will have

every part of a PC and we will just have a full NCCPC PC project figures check them out at NCCC.com and sign up for our newsletter to stay in the loop for whenever we join in.

Also join their socials too if you guys want to see any new updates on any new stuff. Yeah, like exactly Night Modern. New, new, new. Everything's new. We're getting everything, everything in under the sign. Okay. So for those are here, we have two giveaways. We have a poochie giveaway.

Oh, we have a poochie giveaway. This is for joining us live on the chat. And then we also have the main giveaway for it. We're choosing three winners for a key. board and mouse of their choice. So you can choose whichever color you want, which form you want. We'll be doing this for about a week.

We're giving you guys a heads up because, you know, you're joining to chat and everything. Joining us for the podcast with Jason. So for the code, for extra, for extra entries into the poochie giveaway, and I'll make sure to specify. This is for the poochy one.

Is lift me up. Lift me up when, it's all over for poochie that is the extra codes for poochie thank you i for the extra sound effects thank you for that um so lit me up for the poochie giveaway that she gave me 500 extra entries into that now the big one the one to everyone here is waiting for the main giveaway this is for our way saying thank you for joining us live while we talk about our new cases and or new kit not new keyboards and mice jason also a thank you for joining you for joining us live as well to explain some of the awesome stuff you guys been working on

and things that you guys are cooking up. So for those that are here, the code word for the keyboard and mouse giveaway is cluckety-clackety. Just a good old clickety-clackety of the keys itself. That sound like Legos, and I want, Jason, I want you to make sure to utilize that as a selling point because people, once they hear it's like, oh, sounds like Legos, people are going going to love that. instantly.

So we got lift me up and clickety-clockity for the co-words. That's where I say thank you guys. Jason, do you have any last remarks before we head off? No, I'm good. Thank you for you to send this up and the opportunity to talk product. Nice. Thank you for joining us. Yeah.

And thank you guys as well for joining us live and remember tune in every other Friday at 10 a.m. Pacific Standard Time on the official NCT Twitch. And don't forget to listen to previous episodes on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and SoundCloud. If you have any question for us, email podcast at nccc.com or you can tag at N6T on all social media platforms. Thank you, Jason, for joining us live and explaining some of these new and awesome keyboards and mice.

Everyone take a look at them on our website or in the chat. And good luck on the giveaway, and we can't wait to see your guys at keyboards and mice on the socials. Thank you, guys. Thank you.