Norbauer Seneca review: a $3,600 luxury keyboard for the keyboard obsessed Canada reviews

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.

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.

For lack of a better word, the Seneca feels permanent. It weighs nearly seven pounds and looks like smooth concrete or worn-down stone. The case is milled aluminum, with a plasma-ceramic oxidized finish that has a warm gray textured look but feels totally smooth. It’s actually hard to pick up; there’s nowhere to curl your fingers under it. It’s supposed to go on your desk and stay there.

The switches and stabilizers were developed by Norbauer & Co. and are exclusive to the company’s keyboards, which is just the Seneca for right now. They are the most interesting thing about the keyboard — the whole reason I wanted to test it. They’re phenomenal.

The switches are a riff on the Topre capacitive dome design (most famously found in the Happy Hacking Keyboard), but they’re smoother and less wobbly, with a deeper sound. Unlike every other Topre-style switch, they’re designed around MX-style keycaps from the start, so the housings don’t interfere with Cherry-profile keycaps. (This is a bigger deal than it may sound; it means the Seneca works with thousands of aftermarket keycap sets, instead of the bare handful that work with Topre boards).

The stabilizers, like the switches, took years to develop. They’re hideously complicated and overengineered, finicky to put together, and they’re without a doubt the best stabilizers in the world. There’s no rattle or tick in any of the stabilized keys, and although the spacebar has a deeper thunk than the rest of the keys, it’s not much louder to my ears.

The typing experience is sublime. The keys have a big tactile bump right at the top, a smooth downstroke, and a snappy upstroke. The ones on my review unit are medium weight, which are supposed to feel similar to 45g Topre; there are lighter and heavier options.

The switches are muted, not silenced; silicone rings on the slider soften the upstroke, and there’s a damper between the switch and PCB that quiets the downstroke and prevents coil crunch. (The switches are compatible with third-party silencing rings; I tried an old Silence-X ring, and it worked fine).

There are gaskets between the switches and the solid brass switchplate, and between the plate and the housing; there’s damping material everywhere. The result is a deep, muted thock, without a hint of ping.

The keyboard’s info page says, “The gentle sound of the Seneca is often likened to raindrops. It has a soft intentionally vintage-sounding thock without being obtrusively clacky.” Read that in whatever voice you’d like. For what it’s worth, Verge executive editor Jake Kastrenakes, who did not read the info page but did listen to the typing test embedded below, also said it sounded like raindrops.

Whatever you compare it to, the Seneca sounds and feels great.

The Seneca is available for preorder now, in a first edition of around 100 to 150 units, starting at $3,600.

The unit I’ve been testing is from Edition Zero — the first production run — which includes 50 that were offered in a private sale last summer to a small group of previous Norbauer clients, as well as a few more for testing, certification, and review.

The Edition Zero Senecas, including my review unit, came with closed-source firmware that doesn’t allow for hardware-based key remapping, which, for me, is the biggest omission. When Norbauer commissioned the firmware half a decade ago, he opted not to include remappability for the sake of simplicity. He deemed software remapping good enough for a keyboard with a standard layout that isn’t meant to be carried from computer to computer.

I do not share that opinion. I program the same function layer into all of my keyboards, and I’m moderately annoyed every time I reach for a shortcut on the Seneca that just isn’t there. But I have to concede that software remapping — I’ve been using Karabiner-Elements on Mac and the PowerToys Keyboard Manager on Windows — is basically tolerable in the short term. But hardware remapping is important on compact keyboards, like the one the company plans to make next. Norbauer is working with Luca Sevá, aka Cipulot — the guy for third-party electrocapacitive PCBs — on new open-source firmware that will allow for remapping. That firmware will be available on the Seneca, probably by the time the First Edition keyboards ship, but wasn’t yet available during my test period.

There are a few other quirks. The Seneca’s custom cable uses USB-C on the computer end and a Lemo connector at the near end. It looks very cool, and it keeps the aesthetic coherent, but if the Seneca is joining a rotation of other keyboards on your desk, it means you have to swap cables every time. On the one hand, if you’re buying a 7-pound, $3,600 keyboard, are you really going to move it off your desk that much? On the other, if you care enough about keyboards to buy this one, you probably do have a lot of nice keyboards you want to rotate between. (Norbauer is working on a short Lemo-to-USB-C dongle, but that also wasn’t ready during the review period.)

The Seneca has a totally flat typing angle. Most mechanical keyboards are higher in the back than the front, with a typing angle between 3 and 11 degrees. Ergonomically, flat (or even negative) is better. There’s an optional riser ($180, made in South Africa from native hardwoods) that gives it a three-degree typing angle, if you prefer. On a whim, I put it backward, giving the keyboard a negative three-degree angle, and now all my other keyboards feel weird. This might be the Seneca’s biggest impact on my life going forward.

Over the past month or so, I’ve asked a few friends and family members to try typing on the Seneca. Most of them have desk jobs, and most use mechanical keyboards all day long, but they’re not keyboard nerds.

They have been, as a rule, moderately impressed. Everyone thinks it looks nice, and everyone likes the way it feels and sounds, but they are not blown away. It hasn’t ruined them for their Keychrons. Most of them ask where the number pad is.

On a functional level, the Seneca doesn’t do anything more than a $115 Keychron. Actually, it does less: there’s no wireless, no backlighting, no volume knob, no hotswap switches, and (for now) no firmware remapping. As a machine for typing, it’s peerless, but maybe not in a way that anyone but a keyboard obsessive is going to notice or care about. And that’s fine.

If you’re selling a keyboard for $3,600, you’ve narrowed your audience to two tiny and overlapping groups. You have to be able to convince the pickiest keyboard nerds on Earth that there’s something about your keyboard they can’t get anywhere else. And you have to convince the nouveau riche coders and status-obsessed desk jockeys that you’ve convinced the keyboard nerds and that this keyboard is worth half an entry-level Rolex.

Some small number of people who buy the Seneca will surely only do so because it’s beautiful and useful, and they can afford it. And that’s as good a reason as any. But mostly, this is a luxury keyboard for a very specific type of keyboard nerd. If your idea of nice is a preposterously heavy capacitive board, the Seneca is better than anything else you can buy or build.

You don’t have to spend $3,600 to get an amazing keyboard. Obviously. It’s very easy not to spend $3,600 on a keyboard. You can have a great time with an off-the-shelf board that costs under $100. For less than 10 percent of the Seneca’s price, you can get a barebones kit keyboard, add whatever switches and stabilizers and keycaps you want, and have way more control over the end result than you do with the Seneca. (Strong endorsement here for the Classic-TKL and the Bauer Lite). You can get a Realforce keyboard for $250 and fall in love with the Topre switches that launched Norbauer on the path to the Seneca all those years ago.

If you’re smart, you’ll stop there. Or, if you’re like me, you’ll find yourself a decade later with way more keyboards than computers, half-convinced to spend $3,600 on the nicest keyboard in the world.