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 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 totally customized capacitive keyboard that begins at $3,600 and may be the most effective pc keyboard ever constructed. I’ve additionally made a bunch of different individuals kind 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 stated it was positive. 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.
$3600
The Good
- Lovely
- Unimaginable typing really feel & sound
- Traditional format
- Simply have a look at it
The Unhealthy
- No firmware remappability but
- Proprietary cable
- Preposterously costly
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 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, right down to creating his personal switches and stabilizers, at preposterous expense. It might be an interesting story even when he’d failed.
You may 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 manufactured from components you possibly can’t get wherever else, inside a steel chassis manufactured to a frankly pointless diploma of precision, and hand-assembled in Los Angeles by a small staff of mildly well-known keyboard nerds.
It’s staggeringly heavy, ungodly costly, and unbelievably nice to kind on, in a manner that possibly solely diehard keyboard lovers will absolutely 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 finish that has a heat grey textured look however feels completely easy. It’s truly arduous to select up; there’s nowhere to twist your fingers underneath it. It’s speculated to go in your desk and keep there.
The switches and stabilizers had been developed by Norbauer & Co. and are unique to the corporate’s keyboards, which is simply the Seneca for proper now. They’re probably the most attention-grabbing factor in regards to the keyboard — the entire cause I wished to check it. They’re phenomenal.
The switches are a riff on the Topre capacitive dome design (most famously discovered within the Blissful Hacking Keyboard), however they’re smoother and fewer wobbly, with a deeper sound. Not like each different Topre-style change, 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 might sound; it means the Seneca works with hundreds 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, they usually’re for sure the most effective 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 a giant tactile bump proper on the high, a easy downstroke, and a handy guide a rough upstroke. Those on my assessment unit are medium weight, that are speculated 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 change 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 positive).
There are gaskets between the switches and the strong 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 info page says, “The light sound of the Seneca is usually likened to raindrops. It has a smooth 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 check embedded under, additionally stated it gave the impression of raindrops.
No matter you evaluate it to, the Seneca sounds and feels nice.
The Seneca is available 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 had been supplied in a personal sale final summer season to a small group of earlier Norbauer purchasers, in addition to a couple of extra for testing, certification, and assessment.
The Version Zero Senecas, together with my assessment 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 format that isn’t meant to be carried from pc to pc.
I don’t share that opinion. I program the identical operate 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 brief time period. However {hardware} remapping is vital 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 permit for remapping. That firmware will likely 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 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 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 need 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 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 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 (or even negative) is better. There’s an non-obligatory riser ($180, made in South Africa from native hardwoods) that provides it a three-degree typing angle, for those who favor. On a whim, I put it backward, giving the keyboard a detrimental three-degree angle, and now all my different keyboards really feel bizarre. This may be the Seneca’s greatest affect 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 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 useful stage, 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 positive.
When you’re promoting a keyboard for $3,600, you’ve narrowed your viewers to 2 tiny and overlapping teams. You have got to have the ability to persuade the pickiest keyboard nerds on Earth that there’s one thing about your keyboard they will’t get wherever else. And you need to persuade the nouveau riche coders and status-obsessed desk jockeys that you simply’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 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 a tremendous keyboard. Clearly. It’s very straightforward to not spend $3,600 on a keyboard. You may have a good time with an off-the-shelf board that prices underneath $100. For lower than 10 % of the Seneca’s worth, 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 outcome than you do with the Seneca. (Robust endorsement right here for the Traditional-TKL and the Bauer Lite). You will 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, 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 the earth.