A Technical Study · 1953 — Present
From a 1953 Chicago workshop to the most demanding arcade cabinets in Tokyo, the Cherry switch has been pressed an estimated 47 billion times. This is the anatomy of a click.
Every MX switch is seven precision parts nested inside a 15.6 mm cube. Remove the keycap and the entire mechanism is exposed to light, dust, and an actuary's pen. The pieces, in order of contact, are these.
A key press begins as a physical intention — a finger, a finger's weight, a finger's weight committed to a 4 mm fall. The keycap transmits that force into the stem, the only red part in the system, the only part that moves first.
As the stem descends, two gold-plated leaves approach each other inside the housing. The spring resists. At exactly 2.0 mm of travel — the actuation point — the leaves touch. A circuit closes. The computer receives a number. The number is 1.
For a tactile switch, a small bump leaf pushes against the stem just before actuation, producing the characteristic resistance. For a clicky switch, a second metal leaf snaps past the stem at that moment, adding an audible 60 dB pop. For a linear switch, nothing interrupts the fall.
On release, the spring pushes everything back. The leaves separate. The circuit opens. The finger, which by now has decided what to type next, is already moving.
The leaf-switch architecture that powered the original Cherry microswitch turned out to be ideal for the demands of coin-operated machines: millions of presses, no maintenance, no warning. A well-built Cherry switch in an arcade cabinet would outlast the cabinet itself, the building it stood in, and possibly the zoning laws. This is the era when the click became a global sound effect.
The cross-stem is identical across every MX switch. What changes — the color of the upper housing, the inside of the slider, the presence or absence of a click leaf — defines the feel. Bring your own opinion to the table.
In 1983, when Cherry patented the MX series, they did not set out to invent a sound. They set out to invent a switch that told the truth about itself: a press that confirms, instantly, that the world has been notified.
The audible click of a Blue switch is the click leaf snapping past the slider. In a Pac-Man cabinet, that sound was repeated tens of thousands of times a day. In a typewriter factory in 1974, the same physical event happened a half-million times. In a Tokyo arcade at midnight, 1991, a teenager pressing jab → jab → hadouken heard the click six times in two seconds. The cabinet made that possible. The cabinet made that unforgettable.
By the early 2000s, the mechanical keyboard was a curiosity. Rubber-dome scissor switches had won the mainstream; Cherry's MX patents had aged into folklore. Then the forums happened. Geekhack in 2005, Deskthority shortly after, /r/MechanicalKeyboards in 2010.
Enthusiasts began disassembling switches with tweezers, lubing them with Krytox, filming the springs to dampen ping, and swapping the internal leaves. What was a manufacturing spec became a creative medium. By 2018, the group-buy — a kind of patronage-driven small-batch manufacturing — had turned the Cherry MX clone market into a creator economy worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
Cherry GmbH, the German successor to Walter Cherry's company, still manufactures the original. The cross-shaped stem, the 15.6 mm housing, the gold-plated leaves — all of it is backwards-compatible with a switch made in 1984. In an industry obsessed with obsolescence, that is the rarest feat of all.
+ 18%
clones won volume