This whole thing sounds like scam. I don't think this keyboard is possible to make at $199. Every piece of eink display under the cap costs a few bucks. Then you need insane custom switching board to multiplex all these displays with SPI lines. Probably needs an FPGA to do it fast and reliably. The raw BOM cost alone will be $100 or more.

Fabbing a custom size eink display will cost $200K in tooling + R&D if only they could find a fab that is willing to do sub 100k MOQ orders. Otherwise, it is upwards of $500k. The thing is, no other customer will ever buy a 12x12mm eink display since it is too small to do anything useful, so the eink display manf cannot ammortize the cost of a new line spin up and tooling. It has to be captured and it will be costly.

I'm one of the founders, I exited after the acquisition and now work in VC. It's absolutely possible, the custom EPD was $40USD, we used injection molder keys, and a delrin keyframe. The remaining components for the display timing controller and the keyboard controller were dollars each at scale (excluding the TCM chip which was relatively expensive). The entire BOM cost of goods was far under $100, and was comparable to a Macbook butterfly switch keyboard module.

The entire design with Foxconn / it's customers was specifically for MOQ's of 300k units. We did beta units to 40+ countries.

The NRE for the display was also double your estimate and took around 9+ months to get finished + a few months of delays due to terrible yields on the first Mass produced units.

> This whole thing sounds like scam. I don't think this keyboard is possible to make at $199. Every piece of eink display under the cap costs a few bucks.

It would most likely have a single large display, like the Optimus Popularis. Uglier and less convenient, but way the hell cheaper.

You still pay through your nose for large eInk displays though. I don't get what the fuck makes them so expensive... probably patent issues.

I'd guess low demand as well. Compared to any other type of screen, eInk is extremely niche. E-Readers and some mass produced wearables (Pebble) made it work, but even those had a fairly small market.

Pebble wasn't eink, weirdly enough; it was a "Sharp Memory transflective LCD" (which did have very similar properties, granted).

assuming this will ever be real:

based on similar products that use LCDs, it won't have 60+ displays, it will use a single large display, and the switches will basically activate a touch screen.