When I see that Sony's DualSense controller was only given a 417-hour life, I have to feel a little smug about my mechanical keyboard lasting 800,000 hours. Well, I should just clean it every 50,000 hours.

Yes, the PlayStation 5's sexy new "DualSense" controller has an official lifespan of 4-7 months, as calculated by iFixit. This is an astonishingly short lifespan for a brand new controller for one of the most powerful gaming consoles of all time. What the hell was Sony thinking?

In fact, this is the same failure rate seen on every controller on every console platform for the past 5+ years, even my beloved Xbox One Elite Series 2. This is because all of these controllers use the same Alps thumbsticks and their key components are rated for 2,000,000 cycles.

Thus, while the headline-grabbing 417-hour lifespan is a rather remarkable figure, it is not limited to the infamous DualSense controller or the erratic drift it is currently accused of.

If you want a breakdown of the math contained in iFixit's statement, the analysis is worth a read, but in brief, one of the engineers measured the interaction of the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare controller and ultimately arrived at 100 full rotational cycles per minute iFixit lowered this number to a less demanding 80 cycles per minute. This means that the 2,000,000 cycles figure would still be achieved in 25,000 minutes, or 417 hours.

If this is further reduced to a much more conservative estimate of two hours of game time per day, the total lifespan would be only seven months. In other words, who is out there now?

It is worth remembering that this is the rated life of a particular component, the potentiometer, which senses the actual movement of the thumbstick. This does not mean that it will stop completely after 2,000,000 cycles, but rather the average time before it begins to fail. A controller with such intensive use might last much longer, or it might get a flat tire well before that point is reached.

In any case, these numbers are a far cry from what the best gaming keyboards are rated for. The switches on a basic Cherry MX mechanical keyboard are designed to withstand 50,000,000 clicks, and the keys cannot withstand the kind of personal hammering that a single thumbstick does during a game. A rough estimate of keyboard usage is 1,500 taps on the space bar per day.

That would mean a keyboard switch failure period of a little over 91 years; think of the amount of skin, Cheetos, and general gamer grumpiness that will be jammed under your keys after 91 years. Wow.

Also, DualSense is going to require more soldering skills than I have at my disposal, but it also gives me more chances to repair keyboards. My current board is a Mountain Everest Max, which also uses easily replaceable mechanical key switches. So if I notice that the S key is going crazy due to constantly backing away from combat in Battlefield V, I can quickly pull it out and replace it with a new switch.

Now, I am easily influenced and Jacob is persuasive, so I recently dropped $50 on a set of Halo true switches to get into the Everest base, but it doesn't matter.

But there are also things like Razer's optical switches, which claim a 100 million click life, that can turn a 180-year-old Huntsman Elite into a board that can be passed down to generations of hipster great-grandchildren.