My concerns about optical keyboards (original) (raw)

After buying my Apex 9 TKL, I started thinking more about optical switches and how they work.

As someone who is big into being able to repair my devices, I made sure that I bought a hot-swappable keyboard. Looking at the design I grew concerned with these optical switches.

My main concern is the light beam(or whatever mechanism it uses) will fail, rendering the keyboard, and its "hot-swappable" 'feature' useless. From my understanding, this is not too much of a problem with mechanical switches, as if/when the key stops working, it is almost always the key switch, which can just be replaced(on hot-swappable boards). I know that the optical key switches are rated for 100 million key presses, as opposed to the typical 50 million presses on normal mechanical switches, but am unsure if the previously mentioned mechanisms will last long enough for the switches to to surpass the rating.

TLDR: I want to know the durability/reliability of the optical mechanisms, ideally specific to the apex 9, and about how long it should last.

P.S. I am not very experienced with mechanical/optical keyboards, so it may just be a misunderstanding.