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 case 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 completely customized capacitive keyboard that begins at $3,600 and could be the very best pc keyboard ever constructed. I’ve additionally made a bunch of different individuals kind on it — of us 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 unimaginable.
$3600
The Good
BeautifulIncredible typing really feel & soundClassic layoutJust have a look at it
The Dangerous
No firmware remappability yetProprietary cablePreposterously costly
The Seneca is the primary luxurious keyboard from Norbauer & Co, an organization that wish 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 concerning the Seneca is just not 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 very best keyboard, right down to growing his personal switches and stabilizers, at preposterous expense. It will be a captivating story even when he’d failed.
You possibly can examine Ryan Norbauer’s journey to develop the Seneca within the different article we simply printed. The temporary 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. Your entire keyboard is made from components you’ll be able to’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 workforce of mildly well-known keyboard nerds.
It’s staggeringly heavy, ungodly costly, and unbelievably nice to kind on, in a means that possibly solely diehard keyboard fanatics will totally admire.
For lack of a greater phrase, the Seneca feels everlasting. It weighs almost 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 arduous to choose up; there’s nowhere to twist your fingers beneath it. It’s purported 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 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 Comfortable 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 intervene with Cherry-profile keycaps. (This can be a larger deal than it could sound; it means the Seneca works with 1000’s of aftermarket keycap units, as an alternative 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, and so they’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 handy guide a rough upstroke. Those on my evaluation unit are medium weight, that are purported 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 outdated 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 in all places. The result’s a deep, muted thock, with no trace of ping.
The keyboard’s information web page says, “The mild sound of the Seneca is usually likened to raindrops. It has a comfortable deliberately vintage-sounding thock with out being obtrusively clacky.” Learn that in no matter voice you’d like. For what it’s value, Verge govt editor Jake Kastrenakes, who didn’t learn the information web page however did take heed to the typing check embedded under, additionally stated it seemed like raindrops.
No matter you examine it to, the Seneca sounds and feels nice.
The Seneca is accessible for preorder now, in a primary version of round 100 to 150 models, 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 personal sale final summer time to a small group of earlier Norbauer purchasers, in addition to a number of extra for testing, certification, and evaluation.
The Version Zero Senecas, together with my evaluation 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 adequate for a keyboard with a normal 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 irritated 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-Parts 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 obtainable on the Seneca, most likely by the point the First Version keyboards ship, however wasn’t but obtainable 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 seems 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 must swap cables each time. On the one hand, in case 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 case you care sufficient about keyboards to purchase this one, you most likely do have quite a lot 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 in the course of the evaluation interval.)
The Seneca has a very flat typing angle. Most mechanical keyboards are larger within the again than the entrance, with a typing angle between 3 and 11 levels. Ergonomically, flat (and even unfavourable) is best. There’s an non-obligatory riser ($180, made in South Africa from native hardwoods) that offers it a three-degree typing angle, in case you favor. On a whim, I put it backward, giving the keyboard a unfavourable three-degree angle, and now all my different keyboards really feel bizarre. This could be the Seneca’s largest impression on my life going ahead.
Over the previous month or so, I’ve requested a number 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 seems good, and everybody likes the way in which 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 purposeful 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 means that anybody however a keyboard obsessive goes to note or care about. And that’s high quality.
In case you’re promoting a keyboard for $3,600, you’ve narrowed your viewers to 2 tiny and overlapping teams. You might 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 anyplace else. And you must persuade the nouveau riche coders and status-obsessed desk jockeys that you just’ve satisfied the keyboard nerds and that this keyboard is value 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, and so they can afford it. And that’s pretty much as good a purpose as any. However largely, this can be a luxurious keyboard for a really particular kind of keyboard nerd. In case your concept of good is a preposterously heavy capacitive board, the Seneca is best than the rest you should buy 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 possibly can have a good time with an off-the-shelf board that prices beneath $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 top outcome than you do with the Seneca. (Robust endorsement right here for the Traditional-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.
In case you’re good, you’ll cease there. Or, in case 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.
