Some people can tell great wine from okay wine. They go on wine tastings, take wine tours. They tend to spend more money on wine than most.
I am not one of those people. I can tell wine from vinegar if you show me the bottle. I am just a little bit obsessed with keyboards, though.
I have spent the past couple of months typing on the Seneca, a fully custom capacitive keyboard that starts at $3,600 and might be the best computer keyboard ever built. I’ve also made a bunch of other people type on it — folks whose attitude toward keyboards is a little more utilitarian. My wife uses a mechanical keyboard because I put it on her desk; if I took it away, she would go back to her $30 Logitech membrane keyboard with no complaints. I put the Seneca on her desk. She said it was fine. I took it away. She went back to her other keyboard.
The more normal you are about keyboards, the less impressive the Seneca is. I am not normal about keyboards, and the Seneca is goddamn incredible.
The Seneca is the first luxury keyboard from Norbauer & Co, a company that would like to be for keyboards what Leica is to cameras, Porsche is to cars, or Hermés is to handbags and scarves.
The thing that’s interesting about the Seneca is not that it’s expensive. It’s easy to make something expensive. It’s interesting because it’s the product of a keyboard obsessive’s decade-long quest to make the best possible keyboard, down to developing his own switches and stabilizers, at preposterous expense. It would be a fascinating story even if he’d failed.
But he didn’t.
How to build the best keyboard in the world Ryan Norbauer spent half a decade and hundreds of thousands of dollars reinventing every part of the keyboard. It worked. Photo: Taeha Kim / Norbauer & Co
You can read about Ryan Norbauer’s journey to develop the Seneca in the other article we just published. The brief version is this: the Seneca is a custom keyboard, a descendant of the aftermarket housings Norbauer used to make for Topre boards, except here it’s not just the housing that’s custom. The entire keyboard is made of parts you can’t get anywhere else, inside a metal chassis manufactured to a frankly unnecessary degree of precision, and hand-assembled in Los Angeles by a small team of mildly famous keyboard nerds.
It is staggeringly heavy, ungodly expensive, and unbelievably pleasant to type on, in a way that maybe only diehard keyboard enthusiasts will fully appreciate.
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