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

Some folks can inform nice wine from okay wine. They go on wine tastings, take wine excursions. They are likely to spend extra money on wine than most.

I’m not a type of folks. I can inform wine from vinegar for those who 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 completely customized capacitive keyboard that begins at $3,600 and could be the very best laptop keyboard ever constructed. I’ve additionally made a bunch of different folks kind on it — people whose perspective 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 stated it was high quality. I took it away. She went again to her different keyboard.

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

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 vehicles, or Hermés is to purses and scarves.

The factor that’s attention-grabbing concerning the Seneca shouldn’t be that it’s costly. It’s simple 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, right down to creating his personal switches and stabilizers, at preposterous expense. It could be a captivating story even when he’d failed.

You can examine Ryan Norbauer’s journey to develop the Seneca within the different 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 possibly can’t get wherever else, inside a metallic chassis manufactured to a frankly pointless diploma of precision, and hand-assembled in Los Angeles by a small workforce of mildly well-known keyboard nerds.

It is staggeringly heavy, ungodly costly, and unbelievably nice to kind on, in a means that perhaps solely diehard keyboard fans will absolutely recognize.

For lack of a greater phrase, the Seneca feels everlasting. It weighs almost seven kilos and appears like clean 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 clean. It’s truly arduous to select up; there’s nowhere to twist your fingers below 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 are essentially the most attention-grabbing factor concerning the keyboard — the entire purpose I wished to check it. They’re phenomenal.

The switches are a riff on the Topre capacitive dome design (most famously discovered within the Happy Hacking Keyboard), however they’re smoother and fewer wobbly, with a deeper sound. Unlike each different Topre-style swap, they’re designed round MX-style keycaps from the beginning, so the housings don’t intervene with Cherry-profile keycaps. (This is an even bigger deal than it could sound; it means the Seneca works with 1000’s 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 sophisticated and overengineered, finicky to place collectively, they usually’re unquestionably the very best stabilizers on this planet. 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 classy. The keys have a giant tactile bump proper on the high, a clean downstroke, and a handy guide a rough upstroke. The ones on my assessment unit are medium weight, that are presupposed to really feel just 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 high quality).

There are gaskets between the switches and the stable brass switchplate, and between the plate and the housing; there’s damping materials all over the place. The result’s a deep, muted thock, with out a trace of ping.

The keyboard’s data web page says, “The light sound of the Seneca is commonly likened to raindrops. It has a delicate deliberately vintage-sounding thock with out being obtrusively clacky.” Read 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 take heed to the typing check embedded beneath, additionally stated it gave the impression of raindrops.

Whatever you evaluate it to, the Seneca sounds and feels nice.

The Seneca is on the market 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 Edition Zero — the primary manufacturing run — which incorporates 50 that have been provided in a non-public sale final summer season to a small group of earlier Norbauer purchasers, in addition to a number of extra for testing, certification, and assessment.

The Edition Zero Senecas, together with my assessment unit, got here with closed-source firmware that doesn’t enable for hardware-based key remapping, which, for me, is the most important omission. When Norbauer commissioned the firmware half a decade in the past, he opted to not embrace remappability for the sake of simplicity. He deemed software program remapping ok for a keyboard with an ordinary format that isn’t meant to be carried from laptop to laptop.

I don’t share that opinion. I program the identical operate layer into all of my keyboards, and I’m reasonably irritated each time I attain for a shortcut on the Seneca that simply isn’t there. But I’ve to concede that software program remapping — I’ve been utilizing Karabiner-Elements on Mac and the PowerToys Keyboard Manager on Windows — is principally tolerable within the brief time period. But {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 can enable for remapping. That firmware might be out there on the Seneca, most likely by the point the First Edition keyboards ship, however wasn’t but out there throughout my check interval.

There are a number 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 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 it’s important to swap cables each time. On the one hand, for those who’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, for those who care sufficient about keyboards to purchase this one, you most likely do have a variety of good keyboards you need to rotate between. (Norbauer is engaged on a brief Lemo-to-USB-C dongle, however that additionally wasn’t prepared through the assessment 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 adverse) is healthier. There’s an non-compulsory riser ($180, made in South Africa from native hardwoods) that provides it a three-degree typing angle, for those who choose. On a whim, I put it backward, giving the keyboard a adverse three-degree angle, and now all my different keyboards really feel bizarre. This could be the Seneca’s largest affect on my life going ahead.

Over the previous month or so, I’ve requested a number of family and friends members to strive 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 have been, as a rule, reasonably impressed. Everyone thinks it appears good, and everybody likes the best way it feels and sounds, however they aren’t 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. Actually, 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 perhaps not in a means that anybody however a keyboard obsessive goes to note or care about. And that’s high quality.

If you’re promoting a keyboard for $3,600, you’ve narrowed your viewers to 2 tiny and overlapping teams. You have to have the ability to persuade the pickiest keyboard nerds on Earth that there’s one thing about your keyboard they’ll’t get wherever else. And it’s important 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 accomplish that as a result of it’s stunning and helpful, they usually can afford it. And that’s pretty much as good a purpose as any. But largely, it is a luxurious keyboard for a really particular kind of keyboard nerd. If your concept of good is a preposterously heavy capacitive board, the Seneca is healthier than the rest you should buy or construct.

You don’t should spend $3,600 to get a tremendous keyboard. Obviously. It’s very simple to not spend $3,600 on a keyboard. You can have a good time with an off-the-shelf board that prices below $100. For lower than 10 p.c of the Seneca’s value, you may get a barebones package 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. (Strong endorsement right here for the Classic-TKL and the Bauer Lite). You can 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.

If you’re sensible, you’ll cease there. Or, for those who’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 this planet.