Which Computer Keys Wear Out First?

As casual computer users shift to touchscreens, wear patterns on computer keyboards have evolved, affecting suppliers of replacement letters.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Welcome to brain stuff. From how Stuff works a brain stuff,
it's Christian Seger here. If you spend a lot of
time using a computer, you have undoubtedly noticed that over
time some of the letters on your keyboards start to disappear.
That leads to the question which keys on a keyboard
tend to wear out the fastest. Since keys wear out

(00:23):
because of use, it's logical to assume that the keys
that wear out the fastest are the ones we use
most heavily. So which ones are they? Back in the
days before computers, when typewriters and type setting machines were
used to put words on paper, that was a fairly
easy question to answer. As a trade publication called The

(00:44):
Inland Printer noted, back in it was widely accepted that
the most used key on keyboards was the space bar,
followed by the letter E. Some sources still adhere to
that convention. A Microsoft product marketing off she told Business Insider,
for example, that the most used key was the space bar,

(01:06):
followed by the E and then the backspace key. But
if you really want the definitive answer, the source best
equipped to give it might be someone who replaces computer
keys for a living. Patrick Halcrow is owner and operator
of Laptop dash keys dot com, which supplies keys and

(01:26):
parts needed, along with repair instructions to people who need
to fix their broken laptop keyboards. Halcrow explains in an
email that these days, habits have changed. That's because a
lot of people who were once casual computer users have
switched to using smartphones and tablets with touch screens to

(01:48):
write emails and check out social media and videos, and
the people who still use laptops are mostly either workers
or computer gamers. As Halcrow says, gamer mostly order replacements
for the W, A, S, and D keys, as well
as the arrow keys. That's because these specific keys are

(02:10):
used for player movement in RPG type games as well
as vehicle control in driving type simulators. People who use
desktop and laptop computers for work, in contrast, tend to
replace the vowel keys A, E, I, O, and you,
and the space bar and the arrow keys, which Halcrow

(02:31):
said are the keys pressed most often when typing. According
to Halcrow, people tend to replace keys mostly because of aesthetics.
They don't like the look of a keyboard where some
of the letters are worn off, and not because of
wear and tear on the underlying mechanism. When there is
actual damage, he says, it's not because of wear and tear,

(02:52):
but rather it's accidental. Think of your pets knocking a
laptop off a table or children breaking off the keys,
and this is the case with all accidents, breaking the
actual key mechanism is more unpredictable. Today's episode was written

(03:13):
by Patrick J. Keiger, produced by Dylan Fagan, and for
more on this and other topics, please visit us at
how stuff Works dot com.