Norbauer Seneca overview: a $3,600 luxurious keyboard for the keyboard obsessed

Some individuals can inform nice wine from okay wine. They go on wine tastings, take wine excursions. They have an inclination to spend extra money on wine than most.

I’m not a type of individuals. I can inform wine from vinegar in the event you present me the bottle. I’m just a bit bit obsessive about keyboards, although.

I’ve spent the previous couple of months typing on the Seneca, a totally customized capacitive keyboard that begins at $3,600 and is perhaps the very best pc keyboard ever constructed. I’ve additionally made a bunch of different individuals sort on it — people whose angle towards keyboards is a bit more utilitarian. My spouse makes use of a mechanical keyboard as a result of I put it on her desk; if I took it away, she would return to her $30 Logitech membrane keyboard with no complaints. I put the Seneca on her desk. She mentioned it was wonderful. I took it away. She went again to her different keyboard.

The extra regular you’re about keyboards, the much less spectacular the Seneca is. I’m not regular about keyboards, and the Seneca is goddamn unimaginable.

The Seneca is the primary luxurious keyboard from Norbauer & Co, an organization that want to be for keyboards what Leica is to cameras, Porsche is to automobiles, or Hermés is to purses and scarves.

The factor that’s attention-grabbing in regards to the Seneca isn’t that it’s costly. It’s straightforward to make one thing costly. It’s attention-grabbing as a result of it’s the product of a keyboard obsessive’s decade-long quest to make the absolute best keyboard, all the way down to creating his personal switches and stabilizers, at preposterous expense. It might be an enchanting story even when he’d failed.

You’ll be able to examine Ryan Norbauer’s journey to develop the Seneca in the opposite article we simply revealed. The transient model is that this: the Seneca is a customized keyboard, a descendant of the aftermarket housings Norbauer used to make for Topre boards, besides right here it’s not simply the housing that’s customized. The whole keyboard is manufactured from components you may’t get anyplace else, inside a metallic chassis manufactured to a frankly pointless diploma of precision, and hand-assembled in Los Angeles by a small crew of mildly well-known keyboard nerds.

It’s staggeringly heavy, ungodly costly, and unbelievably nice to sort on, in a manner that possibly solely diehard keyboard lovers will absolutely respect.

For lack of a greater phrase, the Seneca feels everlasting. It weighs practically seven kilos and appears like easy concrete or worn-down stone. The case is milled aluminum, with a plasma-ceramic oxidized end that has a heat grey textured look however feels completely easy. It’s really onerous to choose up; there’s nowhere to curve your fingers underneath it. It’s presupposed to go in your desk and keep there.

The switches and stabilizers have been developed by Norbauer & Co. and are unique to the corporate’s keyboards, which is simply the Seneca for proper now. They’re essentially the most attention-grabbing factor in regards to the keyboard — the entire cause I needed to check it. They’re phenomenal.

The switches are a riff on the Topre capacitive dome design (most famously discovered within the Joyful Hacking Keyboard), however they’re smoother and fewer wobbly, with a deeper sound. Not like each different Topre-style swap, they’re designed round MX-style keycaps from the beginning, so the housings don’t intrude with Cherry-profile keycaps. (This can be a larger deal than it could sound; it means the Seneca works with hundreds of aftermarket keycap units, as a substitute of the naked handful that work with Topre boards).

The stabilizers, just like the switches, took years to develop. They’re hideously difficult and overengineered, finicky to place collectively, they usually’re indubitably the very best stabilizers on the earth. There’s no rattle or tick in any of the stabilized keys, and though the spacebar has a deeper thunk than the remainder of the keys, it’s not a lot louder to my ears.

The typing expertise is elegant. The keys have an enormous tactile bump proper on the high, a easy downstroke, and a quick upstroke. Those on my overview unit are medium weight, that are presupposed to really feel much like 45g Topre; there are lighter and heavier choices.

The switches are muted, not silenced; silicone rings on the slider soften the upstroke, and there’s a damper between the swap and PCB that quiets the downstroke and prevents coil crunch. (The switches are appropriate with third-party silencing rings; I attempted an previous Silence-X ring, and it labored wonderful).

There are gaskets between the switches and the strong brass switchplate, and between the plate and the housing; there’s damping materials all over the place. The result’s a deep, muted thock, and not using a trace of ping.

The keyboard’s data web page says, “The mild sound of the Seneca is usually likened to raindrops. It has a tender deliberately vintage-sounding thock with out being obtrusively clacky.” Learn that in no matter voice you’d like. For what it’s price, Verge government editor Jake Kastrenakes, who didn’t learn the information web page however did hearken to the typing take a look at embedded under, additionally mentioned it gave the impression of raindrops.

No matter you evaluate it to, the Seneca sounds and feels nice.

The Seneca is out there for preorder now, in a primary version of round 100 to 150 items, beginning at $3,600.

The unit I’ve been testing is from Version Zero — the primary manufacturing run — which incorporates 50 that have been supplied in a non-public sale final summer season to a small group of earlier Norbauer purchasers, in addition to a couple of extra for testing, certification, and overview.

The Version Zero Senecas, together with my overview unit, got here with closed-source firmware that doesn’t permit for hardware-based key remapping, which, for me, is the largest omission. When Norbauer commissioned the firmware half a decade in the past, he opted to not embody remappability for the sake of simplicity. He deemed software program remapping ok for a keyboard with a regular structure that isn’t meant to be carried from pc to pc.

I don’t share that opinion. I program the identical perform layer into all of my keyboards, and I’m reasonably aggravated each time I attain for a shortcut on the Seneca that simply isn’t there. However I’ve to concede that software program remapping — I’ve been utilizing Karabiner-Elements on Mac and the PowerToys Keyboard Supervisor on Home windows — is principally tolerable within the quick time period. However {hardware} remapping is necessary on compact keyboards, just like the one the corporate plans to make subsequent. Norbauer is working with Luca Sevá, aka Cipulot — the man for third-party electrocapacitive PCBs — on new open-source firmware that may permit for remapping. That firmware might be out there on the Seneca, in all probability by the point the First Version keyboards ship, however wasn’t but out there throughout my take a look at interval.

There are a couple of different quirks. The Seneca’s customized cable makes use of USB-C on the pc finish and a Lemo connector on the close to finish. It appears to be like very cool, and it retains the aesthetic coherent, but when the Seneca is becoming a member of a rotation of different keyboards in your desk, it means you need to swap cables each time. On the one hand, in the event you’re shopping for a 7-pound, $3,600 keyboard, are you actually going to maneuver it off your desk that a lot? On the opposite, in the event you care sufficient about keyboards to purchase this one, you in all probability do have plenty of good keyboards you wish to rotate between. (Norbauer is engaged on a brief Lemo-to-USB-C dongle, however that additionally wasn’t prepared in the course of the overview interval.)

The Seneca has a completely flat typing angle. Most mechanical keyboards are greater within the again than the entrance, with a typing angle between 3 and 11 levels. Ergonomically, flat (and even destructive) is healthier. There’s an non-compulsory riser ($180, made in South Africa from native hardwoods) that offers it a three-degree typing angle, in the event you desire. On a whim, I put it backward, giving the keyboard a destructive three-degree angle, and now all my different keyboards really feel bizarre. This is perhaps the Seneca’s largest influence on my life going ahead.

Over the previous month or so, I’ve requested a couple of family and friends members to attempt typing on the Seneca. Most of them have desk jobs, and most use mechanical keyboards all day lengthy, however they’re not keyboard nerds.

They’ve been, as a rule, reasonably impressed. Everybody thinks it appears to be like good, and everybody likes the way in which it feels and sounds, however they don’t seem to be blown away. It hasn’t ruined them for his or her Keychrons. Most of them ask the place the quantity pad is.

On a practical degree, the Seneca doesn’t do something greater than a $115 Keychron. Really, it does much less: there’s no wi-fi, no backlighting, no quantity knob, no hotswap switches, and (for now) no firmware remapping. As a machine for typing, it’s peerless, however possibly not in a manner that anybody however a keyboard obsessive goes to note or care about. And that’s wonderful.

When you’re promoting a keyboard for $3,600, you’ve narrowed your viewers to 2 tiny and overlapping teams. You will have to have the ability to persuade the pickiest keyboard nerds on Earth that there’s one thing about your keyboard they will’t get anyplace else. And you need to persuade the nouveau riche coders and status-obsessed desk jockeys that you just’ve satisfied the keyboard nerds and that this keyboard is price half an entry-level Rolex.

Some small quantity of people that purchase the Seneca will certainly solely achieve this as a result of it’s lovely and helpful, they usually can afford it. And that’s nearly as good a cause as any. However principally, this can be a luxurious keyboard for a really particular sort of keyboard nerd. In case your concept of good is a preposterously heavy capacitive board, the Seneca is healthier than anything you should purchase or construct.

You don’t need to spend $3,600 to get an incredible keyboard. Clearly. It’s very straightforward to not spend $3,600 on a keyboard. You’ll be able to have a good time with an off-the-shelf board that prices underneath $100. For lower than 10 % of the Seneca’s value, you will get a barebones equipment keyboard, add no matter switches and stabilizers and keycaps you need, and have far more management over the tip consequence than you do with the Seneca. (Sturdy endorsement right here for the Classic-TKL and the Bauer Lite). You may get a Realforce keyboard for $250 and fall in love with the Topre switches that launched Norbauer on the trail to the Seneca all these years in the past.

When you’re sensible, you’ll cease there. Or, in the event you’re like me, you’ll end up a decade later with far more keyboards than computer systems, half-convinced to spend $3,600 on the nicest keyboard on the earth.