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jetpacktuxedo | 8 years ago
Nope! This is rarely (if ever?) the case. In alps switches, for example, there are two totally separate leafs, one of which handles the tactile feeling and the other of which is responsible for the actual actuation. If you browse through Haata's Plotly[1] you can see that many switches actuate well after the tactile bump. Though they are often pretty closely related in terms of their depth in the keypress, they are wholly unrelated from one another mechanically.
dom0|8 years ago
Cherry MX.
jetpacktuxedo|8 years ago
The tactile event on a Cherry MX Brown is ~1mm into the travel distance, and the actual actuation is ~2mm in. Kaihua Box Orange switches (still an MX-style switch) is an even better example of that. Kaihua Speed Bronze has the actuation point inside of the tactile bump instead of after the bump. I can't find any examples of switches that actuate _before_ the tactile bump (mostly because why would anyone design that?), but tactility and actuation are not inherently tied together in cherry MX switches, either.
They are both handled by a two-part leaf, which you can sort of see in some of the pictures on Deskthority[1]. There are two legs on the slider that have a surface to them that determines the tactility (or lack thereof in the case of linear switches) that slide linearly up and down the top leaf, which flexes it until it makes contact with the bottom leaf. That contact causes the actuation. All of the tactility is determined bu the shape of the slider legs.
[1] https://deskthority.net/wiki/Cherry_MX#Construction