Review: Cherry MX2A

The Cherry MX switch is, arguably, one of the most important mechanical keyboard switches of all time. Some might argue it’s one of the best mechanical switches ever. No other switch has quite the same legacy. It’s been around for decades and is one of the few switches that run the whole gamut of keyboards. You can find it in everything from point-of-sale systems, office cubicles, and police cars to gaming setups and even premium, limited-run custom keyboards.

Until recently, nearly every mechanical gaming keyboard shipped with MX Reds, Browns, or Blues. For a long time, Cherry’s switches were the best option—mechanical switch or otherwise—for building a keyboard, and they had a reputation for their outstanding typing feel and longevity when compared to their rubber dome and scissor-switch contemporaries.

I have a love for the original Cherry MX switches. They still have a personality and charm no other switch has been able to replicate. I type on them regularly, almost every day, and always find them a treat to use, despite their shortcomings. So it came as a surprise when Cherry announced a successor with the MX2A. How could one of the most beloved and long-lasting mechanical switches suddenly change so drastically? Could these changes make the MX better?

Photograph: Henri Robbins

Cherry’s Legacy

The Cherry MX Black is the mechanical switch. It’s a fairly heavy linear switch made entirely of Cherry’s proprietary blend of plastics and has been in production since 1983 with only minimal changes until now. Cherry rates its MX switches for 100 million keypresses, and it’s not unheard of for MX Blacks to be in operation even after two decades of near-constant use. They eventually became a signifier of quality: If you saw a keyboard with MX switches, you could be pretty sure that it would be both reliable and enjoyable to type on.

As the custom keyboard scene started to form in the early 2000s, people realized something interesting—the longer you used MX switches, the smoother they were to type on. This was true for all of them but most noticeably for MX Blacks. They were the most common in high-use office and point-of-sale systems and had a heavier spring that required more force to be pushed down, resulting in the plastics seeing large amounts of wear.

These “vintage” MX Blacks—which had to be desoldered from older keyboards—became incredibly sought out by enthusiasts for their smoothness, and their scarcity increased demand even further. At the time, Vintage MX Blacks were the best switches possible for a custom-built keyboard kit.

It's worth noting that these worn-in switches are fairly scratchy by today’s standards. Modern switches, made from higher-end materials and lubed from the factory, are leagues ahead of MX switches in smoothness. However, many keyboard hobbyists today see the MX Black as having a “good” scratch compared to the scratchiness of other switches. It’s consistent, subtle, and rather charming as long as you don’t expect perfection. There are no sudden bumps or catches, but instead a consistent friction that feels more “real” and satisfying than something engineered for perfect smoothness.

Photograph: Henri Robbins

As the keyboard hobby evolved, third-party switches using the MX design started to pop up. Cherry’s patent for the MX-style switch expired, so countless other companies came in to make alternatives, with Gateron being the most prevalent in the hobbyist space for quite a few years. While many of these switches are fantastic, something became obvious with their proliferation: The original MX switch’s proprietary plastics created a sound that just couldn’t be replicated by another switch—a sound that came loaded with nostalgia that felt entirely natural instead of being engineered to sound good. It was, in many ways, what people thought a switch “should” sound like, even if it wasn’t the ideal, refined sound many enthusiasts chase after.

Cherry Today

Cherry’s MX line of switches is still thriving. The diminishing number of vintage switches means there’s now a market for “worn-in” new switches, and you can even buy MX Blacks that have been pressed hundreds of thousands of times using a specially designed machine to replicate the feel of well-used vintage switches. While these aren’t quite the same—Cherry has done various small retools of the MX switch over time, all of which have been met with some criticism—they’re still remarkably similar to the original MX Blacks.

(Full disclosure: One of my favorite keyboards has a set of worn-in MX Blacks from RNDKBD—I think they’re fun switches, with a charm to them that a more modern and refined switch lacks.)

Onto the MX2A: Cherry has heavily reworked the MX switch, adding new technologies to its internals to reduce unwanted noises and make typing far smoother. I’ve been using MX2A Black switches in a couple of different keyboards for a few months and have also spent some time with a new Cherry keyboard with MX2A Silent Reds installed. My takeaway? Cherry has run into an interesting conundrum with the enthusiast sector of the mechanical keyboard space.

Cherry is now using factory lube and has redesigned the lower housing, reworked the spring shape, and created indents on the inside of the bottom housing and inside the stem to let the spring sit more rigidly inside the switch. There are a ton of other minute changes, but these are the most prevalent and noteworthy.

Photograph: Henri Robbins

The MX2A has improved on the original MX switch in almost every possible way. They’re smoother, sound better, and have a great bottom-out feel. Almost all the extraneous noise (spring ping, leaf crunch, housing rattle, and so on) has been reduced, if not fully eliminated, and I enjoy using them overall.

However, they’ve lost some of the charms the classic MX had—these switches feel engineered for all of these things, and I’d imagine most enthusiasts won’t see the purpose of the MX2A when every other switch available today has that same end goal. The advances other switches have made in the sound and feel department have already outpaced the MX2A.

Does It Matter?

Looking at the MX2A, its improvements, and the landscape of keyboards today, some questions are unavoidable. First, is it possible to improve something when its flaws are what made it so beloved to begin with? And second, is the MX2A switch even meant for the enthusiast mechanical keyboard market? Does it matter if they like this switch?

I can’t say that I would choose to put these switches into a keyboard I’m building. If I wanted something top-of-the-line, I would opt for a modern and “premium” switch engineered for typing sound. If I wanted something charming yet flawed, I would opt for an older MX Black. I can’t imagine a situation where an MX2A switch would be the ideal choice for a custom keyboard, because its improvements put it in an awkward middle ground between modernity and nostalgia.

But to answer the second question: I really like Cherry’s OEM MX2A keyboard, the KC 200 MX. For what it’s meant to be (an office keyboard), it’s fantastic. It’s a simple and stylish integrated-plate keyboard with an anodized metal top case and a standard 100 percent layout. Without a USB port, hot-swap sockets, programmability, or even a dial, there are hardly any points of failure to worry about.

Photograph: Henri Robbins

If I showed up for an office job and saw the KC 200 MX on my desk, I’d be happy to see it. It’s durable, solid, functional, and feels good to type on. And more importantly—something that’s been demonstrated time and time again by the MX Black—I anticipate it will last forever. MX2A switches are rated for 100 million actuations, while Gateron’s switches are rated for 50 million; quite a few enthusiast switches aren’t rated at all.

I don’t dislike the MX2A switch by any means. It’s not an enthusiast-oriented switch, but it doesn’t need to be, and most of my nitpicks are entirely relegated to a small group of people who know far too much about keyboards. Instead, the MX2A is an improvement on an industry-standard product that takes a reliable design and makes it more enjoyable to use while eliminating what few serious flaws existed.

Cherry was faced with a complex task. It had to figure out how its brand identity should evolve and what it could do to further the innovations that made its switches successful to begin with. It could either keep going as it did before, conform to the newest trends, or innovate in the spaces where its products are truly at risk: High-use, high-volume-production systems that need reliability and now want refinement. Its biggest danger was losing that market to a brand like Gateron, and the new MX2A provided all the right innovations to prevent that from happening while still keeping the details that made the MX switch successful for decades.

I fully expect the MX2A switch to find a home in gaming keyboards, offices, and POS systems for decades going forward, and that’s really where this switch belongs. When so many of our devices become outdated after only two to three years, it’s worth praising something that’s engineered to last, even when it doesn’t match up to the superficial standards we expect.