Status Symbols: Happy Hacking Keyboard

Status Symbols are devices that transcend their specs and features, and become something beautiful and luxurious in their own right. They're things that live on after the megapixel and megahertz wars move past them, beacons of timeless design and innovation.

For anyone who has ever argued over mechanical-switch and buckling-spring keyboards, made the hard choice between vi and Emacs, or manually reassigned a capslock key to control: this is for you. The Happy Hacking Keyboard, built by Fujitsu, and relatively unchanged since 1996, takes a decades-old Unix-style layout, strips out all unecessary fluff (silly dedicated arrow keys, for instance), and marries it with an only-from-Japan ultra-minimal design. It's composed of "Topre" switches, which combine a coiled spring, a rubber dome, and a capacitive switch, for easy-to-press keys and a patented "bounce." For added cred, you can get blank keycaps, and if you really want to get technical, you can flip some DIP switches to reassign keys to your preference.

Ultimately, the keyboard is designed to keep you from ever leaving the home row, relying on key combos and a perfect, near-symmetrical layout as you ease into the code haze. Even if you're far from the prototypical Unix hacker (like, you were born after 1965), there's something incredibly compelling about a keyboard this simple and beautiful, built to last a lifetime. If anybody asks, say vi.

Price: $300; $490 for "silent" version