The term “endgame,” among keyboard enthusiasts, is sort of a running gag. Endgame is when you finally dial in your perfect layout, case, features, switches, and keycaps, so you can stop noodling around with parts and get on with whatever it is you actually use the keyboard for — work, presumably. Then a few months later you see something shiny and start over.
In the search for endgame, most of us have to compromise somewhere — usually time or money. Sometimes the thing you’re looking for just doesn’t exist.
But what if you didn’t have to compromise? What if you had the time, the patience, the creative vision, and the cash to create your endgame keyboard from scratch? And I mean really from scratch, from the cable to the switches and stabilizers.
This is how you get the Seneca, the first keyboard from Norbauer & Co. It has a plasma-oxide-finished milled aluminum chassis, a solid brass switchplate, custom capacitive switches, the best stabilizers in the world (also custom), spherical-profile keycaps with appropriately retro-looking centered legends, zero backlighting, and a completely flat typing angle.
The Seneca. Photo by Nathan Edwards / The Verge
It weighs seven pounds and costs $3,600.
You might have some questions, like: Why is it $3,600? Who would make a keyboard that’s that expensive? And is it even any good?
I’ve spent the last couple of months typing on an early Seneca, and the answer to the last question is the easiest. Yes. It’s incredible. It’s certainly the nicest keyboard you can buy. The build quality is astonishing, the Topre-style switches are better than Topre’s, the stabilizers are better than anyone’s, and the keyboard is beautiful and a joy to type on. The Seneca is a genuine technical accomplishment.
The answer to the first two questions is Ryan Norbauer.
Ryan Norbauer is well known in the keyboard community for his aftermarket housings, but the Seneca is his first ready-to-type board. To hear him tell it, it’s the latest logical step in a decadelong process to build his own endgame keyboard, of which the business — Norbauer & Co. — is an almost accidental byproduct.
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