The time period “endgame,” amongst keyboard fans, is type of a working gag. Endgame is once you lastly dial in your excellent format, case, options, switches, and keycaps, so you possibly can cease noodling round with elements and get on with no matter it’s you really use the keyboard for — work, presumably. Then just a few months later you see one thing shiny and begin over.
Within the seek for endgame, most of us need to compromise someplace — often time or cash. Generally the factor you’re on the lookout for simply doesn’t exist.
However what should you didn’t need to compromise? What should you had the time, the persistence, the inventive imaginative and prescient, and the money to create your endgame keyboard from scratch? And I imply actually from scratch, from the cable to the switches and stabilizers.
That is the way you get the Seneca, the primary keyboard from Norbauer & Co. It has a plasma-oxide-finished milled aluminum chassis, a stable brass switchplate, customized capacitive switches, the most effective stabilizers on the earth (additionally customized), spherical-profile keycaps with appropriately retro-looking centered legends, zero backlighting, and a very flat typing angle.
It weighs seven kilos and prices $3,600.
You might need some questions, like: Why is it $3,600? Who would make a keyboard that’s that costly? And is it even any good?
I’ve spent the final couple of months typing on an early Seneca, and the reply to the final query is the best. Sure. It’s unimaginable. It’s definitely the nicest keyboard you should purchase. The construct high quality is astonishing, the Topre-style switches are higher than Topre’s, the stabilizers are higher than anybody’s, and the keyboard is gorgeous and a pleasure to sort on. The Seneca is a real technical accomplishment.
The reply to the primary two questions is Ryan Norbauer.
Ryan Norbauer is well-known within the keyboard neighborhood for his aftermarket housings, however the Seneca is his first ready-to-type board. To listen to him inform it, it’s the newest logical step in a decadelong course of to construct his personal endgame keyboard, of which the enterprise — Norbauer & Co. — is an nearly unintended byproduct.
Norbauer grew up in West Virginia within the Nineteen Nineties, watching Star Trek: The Subsequent Technology and absorbing each its retro-modern aesthetic and its imaginative and prescient of an egalitarian, post-scarcity world. It was additionally the start of the non-public computing period and the daybreak of the web. The pc represented an escape from the world as it’s, a window into the way forward for Star Trek, of Epcot, of the concept that a extra related world could be a greater one.
The Seneca represents Norbauer’s try and make the absolute best pc keyboard, to his personal requirements and tastes, with out worrying about price — the form of keyboard that appears and looks like we keep in mind keyboards feeling, again once we thought computer systems had been a good suggestion.
“A giant half for me of the attract of keyboards is the connection to my childhood nostalgia about being actually enthusiastic about computing,” Norbauer tells me by way of video chat. So the Seneca is massive, chunky, and has an ordinary tenkeyless format, reasonably than one thing extra compact or unique, as a result of that’s what he’s all the time used, and what brings again that feeling. “I really feel like I can extra authentically make an optimum keyboard if the primary one I make is precisely the one which I need.”
Norbauer has a behavior of wanting issues that don’t exist, then determining methods to construct them from scratch. About 20 years in the past, he acquired an concept for a courting web site. “I didn’t have any cash in any respect. I dropped out of a PhD program and I simply had this concept for a corporation I needed to start out and I couldn’t rent anybody to code it for me. So I’m like, ‘Okay, I assume I simply need to discover ways to code.’”
He spent six months coding for 14 hours a day; this acquired him a web site, a startup, and tendonitis. Fixing the tendonitis concerned adopting correct typing kind (wrists straight, palms hovering over the keyboard like a pianist’s). Looking for a extra comfy keyboard ultimately despatched him down the trail of an obsession.
The courting web site led to 2 extra startups. Promoting all three startups in 2010 gave him the money and time to discover new pursuits: at first, studying some industrial design abilities so he may make Star Trek prop replicas. It additionally led him to Topre keyboards.
Topre switches — most famously discovered within the Completely happy Hacking Keyboard — have a rubber dome below every key, as an alternative of a bodily change. Pushing the important thing collapses the dome, which compresses a conical spring; a capacitive circuit below every key senses the change in capacitance and, at a sure threshold, registers a keypress. Releasing the change snaps the dome again into place.
Topre keyboards are uncommon in comparison with mechanical keyboards utilizing Cherry MX-style switches. Just a few corporations ever made them, so there aren’t many format choices, they usually are typically costlier, with fewer options for the cash. They’re additionally more durable to customise, with only some totally different dome choices; in addition they aren’t appropriate with most aftermarket keycaps out of the field. And whereas metallic circumstances are widespread in fanatic mechanical keyboards, Topre keyboards solely are available in plastic. However Topre boards have a devoted fan base as a result of the domes give Topre switches a handy guide a rough tactility you possibly can’t in any other case replicate.
By 2014, he was utilizing a modified Topre Realforce 87u keyboard in an aftermarket aluminum housing. He was additionally designing a Star Trek-inspired keycap set. Like most aftermarket keycaps, it labored with Cherry MX-style mechanical switches; Topre boards have a special keycap mount. So he couldn’t use his Star Trek keycaps on his favourite keyboard.
However then Cooler Grasp got here out with the NovaTouch, which had Topre switches however labored with common keycaps. Norbauer acquired one, however its low cost plastic housing didn’t really feel proper. He couldn’t discover anybody to make him an aluminum housing for it. “So I simply stated, ‘Fuck it, I’ll determine it out myself.’”
He designed a housing and realized sufficient machining to make a prototype on a WWII-era milling machine. As soon as he was glad with the design, he discovered a producer and launched a small group buy on a keyboard discussion board and requested if every other Topre diehards needed one, to cowl the prices of creating one for himself.
He figured it was a one-time factor. “It was by no means supposed to be a enterprise, however individuals simply stored asking me to make increasingly more, and the factor form of snowballed by itself.” He did just a few extra rounds of the case ultimately dubbed the Norbatouch, in just a few new colours, together with a beige to go with his now officially licensed Star Trek keycaps. Then, as a result of individuals stored asking, he began making housings for different Topre keyboards.
There was the Norbaforce, for Realforce tenkeyless keyboards, and the Heavy-6 and Heavy-9, for the Leopold FC660C and FC980C, respectively. And in 2020, there was the Heavy Grail, his hottest housing, for the Completely happy Hacking Keyboard.
Every was an opportunity to refine his aesthetic and his manufacturing functionality, and to experiment with totally different supplies (metal, titanium, milled polycarbonate, copper) and finishes (sprucing, bead-blasting, anodizing, powdercoating, cerakote, electroplating, even verdigris).
1/7
However they’re nonetheless solely housings, not the keyboards themselves; to finish them, you continue to need to shuck a $200-plus keyboard from its plastic shell and stick it into the Norbauer housing. Making housings for different corporations’ keyboards put him on the mercy of their provide chains and design choices. The NovaTouch was discontinued a number of months earlier than his first batch of casings was prepared; provide of Leopold’s keyboards was unpredictable even earlier than the corporate stopped making them.
He additionally needed extra management over the opposite elements of the board, and he needed one thing to supply individuals who just like the Norbauer aesthetic however aren’t up for getting a keyboard, cracking it open, voiding the guarantee, and transplanting the heart into a brand new case.
Once I first emailed Norbauer in late 2018, he was already speaking about constructing a ready-to-type keyboard — one thing individuals may choose up and revel in instantly. “I didn’t know precisely what that might appear to be, and I definitely didn’t know the way onerous it might be to get to that time. If I did, I in all probability by no means would have undertaken it.”
He made a prototype utilizing off-the-shelf elements — normal MX-compatible switches and stabilizers — then scrapped it. There are already dozens of corporations making customized keyboards.
As an alternative, he determined to create the factor he’s needed all alongside: a keyboard with a heavy metallic chassis and his personal retrofuturistic aesthetic, with the snappy tactile suggestions of a Topre-like capacitive dome change and compatibility with the vast world of aftermarket keycaps.
“It was a kind of issues the place my ambitions simply form of spiraled uncontrolled.”
He employed {an electrical} engineering agency to design the PCB, which he figured could be the toughest half, since Topre change clones are fairly simple to come back by. That took a few yr, on and off. “After which I spotted, ‘Shit, I assume I’ve to make all the opposite stuff that goes with it.’ And that took about 5 years.”
Someplace alongside the road, the mission become a deliberate train in making the most effective keyboard he presumably can, no matter price. “It was a kind of issues the place my ambitions simply form of spiraled uncontrolled.”
For instance: Topre switches really feel nice to sort on, however they are typically wobbly on the high — comprehensible for one thing sitting on high of a rubber dome — and keycaps usually find yourself barely crooked. He needed a barely deeper typing sound, and he needed correct compatibility with MX-style keycaps. It’s not sufficient to swap the slider for one with the plus-sign -shaped MX stem, like different corporations do; you even have to revamp the housings, or the keycaps simply find yourself slamming into them.
He figured he may do higher. His first prototypes sounded nice, however they had been simply as wobbly as Topre. His second design had tighter tolerances, so it wobbled much less, however it sounded worse. He added extra materials to get a deeper sound. Every revision required one other (costly) spherical of injection-molded tooling as he looked for the most effective mixture of really feel and sound.
By the fourth revision — those within the Seneca — the switches don’t look very similar to Topre. He redesigned the housings to keep away from interference with MX-style keycaps, and added a 3rd alignment leg to the sliders; they don’t rotate as simply within the housings, so the keycaps aren’t crooked. They’ve the excessive tactile bump and clean downstroke of Topre switches, with a deeper sound. There’s a silicone ring for upstroke damping, and a gasket the place they press in opposition to the underside of the brass switchplate.
Whereas he was engaged on the switches, he tackled the stabilizer problem. Stabilizers are the mechanisms that hook up with lengthy keys, just like the house bar, shift, enter, and backspace, and ensure the entire key strikes downward on the identical price no matter the place it’s pressed. They work, however they sound horrible, until you discover some approach to cease the wire from rattling within the housing, the slider from slamming into the PCB, and the varied plastic elements from rubbing collectively. Normally this entails some mixture of lubes, greases, and bodily damping. Tuning the stabilizers is essentially the most time-consuming and tough a part of most keyboard builds.
“The unique plan was to make use of hand-lubed MX stabilizers as a result of it’s such an ordinary factor, proper? However I assumed it simply could be fascinating to see if there was some approach to clear up this drawback with out requiring all of it to be based mostly on lubrication to dissipate the sound.”
Norbauer desires the Seneca to be the most effective keyboard on the earth, so he has no alternative. He has to make the most effective stabilizers on the earth.
Growing the Seneca’s stabilizers took a number of years, a bunch of false begins, and, in his phrases, a “private money bazooka.” His first try, totally on his personal, resulted in what he thought-about a “90 p.c answer” — higher than something available on the market, with out lube. However 90 p.c there’s 10 p.c not there. He began over.
He labored with a firm that specializes in kinematics to develop a completely new stabilizer mechanism. Truly, they got here up with two new stabilizer mechanisms. The primary is a compliant-beam design that’s considerably higher than present stabilizers in addition to his first prototype. It’s a lot much less susceptible to rattle or tick. It’s as near excellent as you may get with out completely rethinking how stabilizers work. The second design is a sophisticated sequence of pin-joint hinges with 5 instances as many elements as an ordinary stabilizer. It’s hideously costly to supply and each time consuming and fiddly to assemble, however it’s higher.
The Seneca makes use of the second design.
That is illustrative of Norbauer’s normal method, which is that fixing technical issues is far more fascinating than making an attempt to attenuate manufacturing prices. On the Seneca, that’s taken to a deliberate excessive. “Our purpose is simply to make this good, and that’s all that issues. And so every time there was a department, I used to be like, ‘Let’s go together with the rightest approach to do it and rattling the prices.’ And that has been the philosophy of this board.”
The Seneca’s case is milled from stable aluminum, with an MAO plasma-oxide finish; he needed to arrange an organization in China with a view to supply it. There’s a heat grey possibility known as travertine, which has a matte, barely speckled stonelike look, and a lighter grey known as oxide, which appears to be like a bit like concrete. They’re each clean to the contact. (There’s additionally a matte black model, which I haven’t seen in individual, and a virtually $8,000 titanium possibility, which ditto.)
The switchplate is milled from stable brass, for the acoustic properties, after which chrome-plated for aesthetics. Aluminum would have been cheaper, lighter, and simpler to mill, however brass absorbs sound higher, so brass it’s. The PCB comprises a galvanic isolation chip to mitigate the extremely unlikely occasion {that a} rogue energy provide sends a blast of electrical energy from the pc’s USB port into the keyboard. The cable has an obscenely costly Lemo connector on the keyboard facet. Lemo connectors are safer than USB and Norbauer thinks they’re cool, and funky is healthier, and it’s his keyboard.
The keycaps are the least customized a part of the board. Not that he wouldn’t have designed a brand new keycap profile for the Seneca, you perceive. He regarded into it, however within the meantime MTNU got here out. MTNU’s spherical high surfaces and centered legends have precisely the aesthetic Norbauer was on the lookout for, and it’s extra comfy to sort on than different retro-looking keycap profiles like SA or MT3. All he needed to do was choose the colours.
Every Seneca is assembled by hand in Norbauer’s storage in Los Angeles, at a price of 1 or two per day, by both Norbauer or Taeha Kim — aka Taeha Varieties, keyboard influencer and bespoke keyboard builder turned Norbauer & Co. worker/investor.
The stabilizers alone take Taeha an hour or two per keyboard, together with a step the place he takes a tiny reamer to every set to make the pin holes giant sufficient for the (precision-ground) pins to slot in, these tolerances being tighter than might be managed with injection molding alone.
(I’m referring to Norbauer by his final identify and Taeha by his first as a result of that’s how they’re every identified within the keyboard neighborhood.)
“Generally, if it’s not reamed fairly sufficient, you’ll get somewhat little bit of sluggishness within the match between these elements. And the friction throughout the entire system is cumulative. So when you’ve got somewhat little bit of sluggishness in just a few locations, you don’t know till you’ve put the entire thing collectively that the stabilizer itself is somewhat bit sluggish,” says Norbauer. When that occurs, they need to disassemble the keyboard, repair the stabilizer, and begin over.
The cumulative impact of all these decisions is a keyboard that has each extremely excessive upfront prices and excessive per-unit prices. Truly, it sounds so costly I ask Norbauer if he’s getting cash on the Seneca, even at $3,600 a pop.
The response is a right away “Not but! Oh God.”
“I imply, positively once I promote this primary batch, and possibly the second batch, and nicely into the third or fourth, I’d not have recouped my R&D prices on it. And it’s an fascinating query. So, I’m dangerous at enterprise.”
For more often than not he was making aftermarket housings, he says, the enterprise wasn’t notably worthwhile. “My purpose has all the time been mainly to interrupt even whereas additionally doing actually cool R&D stuff. I’m not personally shedding a ton of cash. However the Heavy Grail, for instance, was a highly regarded providing. Individuals actually liked it and it offered far more than I ever thought it might. And that helped bootstrap and fund the Seneca, however one hundred pc of what would have been revenue went into that.”
At the same time as he was transitioning Norbauer & Co. from an organization that sells housings to 1 that sells keyboards, he stored working into the truth that he doesn’t like most elements of working a enterprise. This isn’t an enormous drawback once you’re promoting just a few dozen DIY housings at a time to Topre fans as a self-funding interest. Should you’re making an attempt to construct a enterprise that sells absolutely customized luxurious keyboards, it’d develop into an issue.
Final yr, when the Seneca was largely developed and he was staring down a mountain of logistical duties, he offered slightly below half the corporate to the funding agency Tiny, run by an outdated acquaintance. The association leaves Norbauer with a majority stake and whole inventive management — he’s nonetheless the CEO — and lets him deal with creating keyboards whereas different individuals care for the “getting cash” a part of it.
Different individuals, on this case, is Caleb Bernabe, Norbauer & Co.’s government in residence. In a 12,000-word blog post announcing the sale, Norbauer writes, “He acts primarily as our COO, however his job description is mainly doing all of the issues that I hate — a skillset at which he inexplicably however admirably excels.”
Picture by Nathan Edwards / The Verge
The Seneca gained’t make you a greater author — or a sooner one, to my chagrin (ask me what number of deadlines I blew scripting this piece). I, personally, can not justify spending $3,600 on a keyboard; I don’t know too many individuals who may. However after spending a pair months with the Seneca, I can see why somebody would.
It is a keyboard nerd’s luxurious keyboard. That Norbauer spent half a decade and a whole bunch of hundreds of {dollars} creating it’s wild; that he really pulled it off is even wilder. The switches and stabilizers alone are an amazing achievement, and proper now the Seneca is the one place they dwell.
Norbauer has spent a decade constructing credibility within the keyboard neighborhood and amassing a loyal (and well-heeled) fan base. He could make a $3,600 keyboard and be fairly certain that sufficient individuals will purchase it that he could make it make sense.
Not that he desires to promote a lot of keyboards. In actual fact, not promoting loads of keyboards is a part of the plan. He offered 50 of them final summer season, sight unseen, in a non-public preorder for a gaggle of earlier purchasers — paying beta testers, primarily. Proper now he’s promoting one other 150 or so “First Version” keyboards, to be delivered in late summer season. Then he’ll in all probability do one other batch. And one other one after that. However he’s not going to promote one million.
“I take into consideration my long-term imaginative and prescient for what we’re doing as being form of like Leica, the digicam firm. They do loopy issues that simply wouldn’t exist in any other case, like their monochrome digicam. I feel it’s a really technically fascinating factor. There’s clearly a tiny viewers for it. And so with a view to make it in any cheap manner, it’s important to cost a ton for it, as a result of how many individuals on Earth are going to purchase it? However I’m happier that that exists on the earth.”
“With a purpose to make it in any cheap manner, it’s important to cost a ton for it.”
As wild as it might be to reinvent the stabilizer and the change simply to make just a few hundred seven-pound keyboards for wealthy coders, Norbauer plans to make different keyboards, now that he has the “full stack” of switches, stabilizers, and firmware and isn’t constrained by the handful of layouts accessible in Topre keyboards.
“The Seneca is supposed to be this very dense sound-absorbing keyboard, a extra deep thocky form of factor that’s a everlasting set up in your desk. And so the subsequent factor is to go as far to the opposite finish of the spectrum on these issues as attainable.”
It is going to in all probability be a 60-key HHKB-layout keyboard. It might need Bluetooth. And he’s pondering of doing it in both milled polycarbonate or solid carbon fiber, if he can pull that off. “The sound signature can be radically totally different. The load can be radically totally different. And we’ll optimize for the alternative of every thing we optimize for on the Seneca.”
There are such a lot of extra fascinating issues for Norbauer to deal with. He’s having the firmware rewritten to make it open-source and add {hardware} remapping. There’s the subsequent keyboard to design. New supplies to experiment with. And there’s that different stabilizer design, the easier one — just a few corporations have approached him about getting it into manufacturing, however it wants a bit extra R&D first.
Simply don’t ask for a timeline. It’ll be carried out when it’s carried out.