I’m a transcriber, and easily type 10,000 words on a daily basis. If the average word is six letters long, then that’s 60,000 keystrokes, probably a lot more. Some days I type 20,000 words, and that’s excluding emails, comments, browsing etc. If you say that you use only 20 letters or so for 85% of all words (so excluding q, z, x, j, v, k mostly) then it works out at about 3,000 key strokes on an average day, for commonly pressed letter keys. (This is a conservative underestimate though, and the truer figure is probably closer 4,000 for common letters). As you say, based on your analysis the space bar takes heavy abuse, being pressed 12% of the time. So if my mechanical keyboard is rated for 50,000,000 key presses, then 50mil divided by 3,000 works out at 16,666 days, which in years works out as about 45. However, the true figure could quite conceivably higher than this, and it’s entirely possible that if I worked twice as hard as I do now, then I could wear out even a mechanical keyboard in about 20 years. I have no plans of doing that though, seeing as I’ve been transcribing for the last nine years, and do not wish to continue much past a decade. As a side note though, one huge upside of this work, is that you get incredibly quick at typing; I mean I can easily type at 100 words/min without any formal training. When I started I could maybe manage 30 comfortably, at best. So I could say it’s more than tripled my productivity since when I began. I do think, again on a side note, that formal keyboard touch typing training is actually a negative, and I would encourage people to shy away from it. Lots of my contemporaries have carpal tunnel syndrome and other ailments, and they all invariably have been formally trained. Keeping your hands frozen in one place is unhealthy in my opinion, I pivot both hands, which is a much more natural motion. I’ve never had any injuries, including repetitive strain injury for example, and if anything I do more typing than most other transcribers. So formal training is definitely a cause of most injuries, based on people I know. But it would be interesting to investigate this scientifically. Anyhow, thanks for you article though, it was very illuminating, and I agree that most casual users, who aren’t doing industrial quantities of typing will probably never wear out a keyboard, probably even most gamers, with the exception of a few of the most hardcore.

Your math on the keystroke years is incorrect. If you are averaging around 4.2 – 4.3 million keystrokes in a year then it will take around 22-23 years to hit 100 million. You put down 195 years, would would be about 819 million keystrokes.

I had to replace 2 Microsoft Mice 1850 after *one* year of use, because clicking on their left button ended up in a double-click, making life impossible. So, I believe they lasted 100,000 clicks each. Should I send them back to Microsoft and get reimbursed?