The best way to construct the most effective keyboard on this planet

The time period “endgame,” amongst keyboard lovers, is form of a working gag. Endgame is whenever you lastly dial in your good structure, case, options, switches, and keycaps, so you’ll be able to cease noodling round with components and get on with no matter it’s you really use the keyboard for — work, presumably. Then a number of months later you see one thing shiny and begin over.

Within the seek for endgame, most of us should compromise someplace — normally time or cash. Generally the factor you’re in search of simply doesn’t exist.

However what if you happen to didn’t should compromise? What if you happen to had the time, the persistence, the artistic 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 strong brass switchplate, customized capacitive switches, the most effective stabilizers on this planet (additionally customized), spherical-profile keycaps with appropriately retro-looking centered legends, zero backlighting, and a totally 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 unbelievable. It’s actually the nicest keyboard you should buy. 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 most recent logical step in a decadelong course of to construct his personal endgame keyboard, of which the enterprise — Norbauer & Co. — is an nearly unintentional byproduct.

Norbauer grew up in West Virginia within the Nineteen Nineties, watching Star Trek: The Subsequent Era 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 private 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 linked world can be a greater one.

The Seneca represents Norbauer’s try and make the very best laptop keyboard, to his personal requirements and tastes, with out worrying about price — the type 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 huge, chunky, and has a regular tenkeyless structure, somewhat 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 strictly the one which I need.”

Norbauer has a behavior of wanting issues that don’t exist, then determining the way to construct them from scratch. About 20 years in the past, he received an thought 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 an organization I wished to start out and I couldn’t rent anybody to code it for me. So I’m like, ‘Okay, I suppose I simply should discover ways to code.’”

He spent six months coding for 14 hours a day; this received him an internet site, a startup, and tendonitis. Fixing the tendonitis concerned adopting correct typing type (wrists straight, arms hovering over the keyboard like a pianist’s). Looking for a extra snug 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 might make Star Trek prop replicas. It additionally led him to Topre keyboards.

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 distinct 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 received 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 purchase on a keyboard discussion board and requested if every other Topre diehards wished one, to cowl the prices of constructing one for himself.

He figured it was a one-time factor. “It was by no means supposed to be a enterprise, however folks simply stored asking me to make increasingly more, and the factor type of snowballed by itself.” He did a number of extra rounds of the case ultimately dubbed the Norbatouch, in a number of new colours, together with a beige to go along with his now formally licensed Star Trek keycaps. Then, as a result of folks 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 Blissful 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 (sharpening, bead-blasting, anodizing, powdercoating, cerakote, electroplating, even verdigris).

However they’re nonetheless solely housings, not the keyboards themselves; to finish them, you continue to should shuck a $200-plus keyboard from its plastic shell and stick it into the Norbauer housing. Making housings for different firms’ 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 wished extra management over the opposite features of the board, and he wished 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.

After I first emailed Norbauer in late 2018, he was already speaking about constructing a ready-to-type keyboard — one thing folks might choose up and revel in instantly. “I didn’t know precisely what that will seem like, and I actually didn’t know the way arduous it will be to get to that time. If I did, I most likely by no means would have undertaken it.”

He made a prototype utilizing off-the-shelf components — customary MX-compatible switches and stabilizers — then scrapped it. There are already dozens of firms making customized keyboards.

As a substitute, he determined to create the factor he’s wished 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.

He employed {an electrical} engineering agency to design the PCB, which he figured can be the toughest half, since Topre change clones are fairly straightforward to come back by. That took a couple of 12 months, on and off. “After which I noticed, ‘Shit, I suppose I’ve to make all the opposite stuff that goes with it.’ And that took about 5 years.”

Someplace alongside the road, the undertaking changed into a deliberate train in making the most effective keyboard he presumably can, no matter price. “It was a type of issues the place my ambitions simply type of spiraled uncontrolled.”

For instance: Topre switches really feel nice to sort on, however they are usually wobbly on the prime — comprehensible for one thing sitting on prime of a rubber dome — and keycaps typically find yourself barely crooked. He wished a barely deeper typing sound, and he wished 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 firms do; you even have to revamp the housings, or the keycaps simply find yourself slamming into them.

He figured he might 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, but it surely 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 drawback. 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 charge no matter the place it’s pressed. They work, however they sound horrible, until you discover some solution to cease the wire from rattling within the housing, the slider from slamming into the PCB, and the varied plastic components from rubbing collectively. Often 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 a regular factor, proper? However I assumed it simply can be fascinating to see if there was some solution to resolve this drawback with out requiring all of it to be primarily based on lubrication to dissipate the sound.”

Norbauer needs the Seneca to be the most effective keyboard on this planet, so he has no selection. He has to make the most effective stabilizers on this planet.

Creating 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 % resolution” — higher than something available on the market, with out lube. However 90 % there may be 10 % not there. He began over.

He labored with a agency that focuses on kinematics to develop a very new stabilizer mechanism. Really, 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 vulnerable to rattle or tick. It’s as near good as you will get with out completely rethinking how stabilizers work. The second design is a sophisticated collection of pin-joint hinges with 5 instances as many components as a regular stabilizer. It’s hideously costly to provide and each time consuming and fiddly to assemble, but it surely’s higher.

The Seneca makes use of the second design.

That is illustrative of Norbauer’s normal strategy, which is that fixing technical issues is far more fascinating than attempting to reduce manufacturing prices. On the Seneca, that’s taken to a deliberate excessive. “Our aim is simply to make this good, and that’s all that issues. And so each time there was a department, I used to be like, ‘Let’s go along with the rightest solution to do it and rattling the prices.’ And that has been the philosophy of this board.”

The Seneca’s case is milled from strong aluminum, with an MAO plasma-oxide end; he needed to arrange an organization in China so as to supply it. There’s a heat grey choice referred to as travertine, which has a matte, barely speckled stonelike look, and a lighter grey referred to as oxide, which appears 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 choice, which ditto.)

The switchplate is milled from strong 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 appeared into it, however within the meantime MTNU got here out. MTNU’s spherical prime surfaces and centered legends have precisely the aesthetic Norbauer was in search of, and it’s extra snug 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 charge 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 massive sufficient for the (precision-ground) pins to slot in, these tolerances being tighter than may be managed with injection molding alone.

(I’m referring to Norbauer by his final title 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 just a little little bit of sluggishness within the match between these components. And the friction throughout the entire system is cumulative. So in case you have just a little little bit of sluggishness in a number of locations, you don’t know till you’ve put the entire thing collectively that the stabilizer itself is just a little bit sluggish,” says Norbauer. When that occurs, they should disassemble the keyboard, repair the stabilizer, and begin over.

The cumulative impact of all these selections is a keyboard that has each extremely excessive upfront prices and excessive per-unit prices. Really, it sounds so costly I ask Norbauer if he’s earning profits on the Seneca, even at $3,600 a pop.

The response is a right away “Not but! Oh God.”

“I imply, positively after I promote this primary batch, and doubtless the second batch, and properly 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 unhealthy at enterprise.”

For more often than not he was making aftermarket housings, he says, the enterprise wasn’t significantly worthwhile. “My aim 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 very talked-about providing. Individuals actually beloved it and it bought far more than I ever thought it will. And that helped bootstrap and fund the Seneca, however 100% of what would have been revenue went into that.”

Whilst he was transitioning Norbauer & Co. from an organization that sells housings to at least one that sells keyboards, he stored working into the truth that he doesn’t like most features of working a enterprise. This isn’t an enormous drawback whenever you’re promoting a number of dozen DIY housings at a time to Topre lovers as a self-funding interest. In the event you’re attempting to construct a enterprise that sells absolutely customized luxurious keyboards, it’d develop into an issue.

Final 12 months, when the Seneca was principally developed and he was staring down a mountain of logistical duties, he bought slightly below half the corporate to the funding agency Tiny, run by an outdated acquaintance. The association leaves Norbauer with a majority stake and complete artistic management — he’s nonetheless the CEO — and lets him give attention to growing keyboards whereas different folks maintain the “earning profits” a part of it.

Different folks, on this case, is Caleb Bernabe, Norbauer & Co.’s government in residence. In a 12,000-word weblog publish asserting 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.”

The Seneca received’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’t justify spending $3,600 on a keyboard; I don’t know too many individuals who might. 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 lots of of 1000’s of {dollars} growing it’s wild; that he really pulled it off is even wilder. The switches and stabilizers alone are an incredible achievement, and proper now the Seneca is the one place they stay.

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 folks will purchase it that he could make it make sense.

Not that he needs to promote a number of keyboards. In reality, not promoting a number of keyboards is a part of the plan. He bought 50 of them final summer season, sight unseen, in a personal 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 most likely 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 type of like Leica, the digital camera firm. They do loopy issues that simply wouldn’t exist in any other case, like their monochrome digital camera. I believe it’s a really technically fascinating factor. There’s clearly a tiny viewers for it. And so so as to make it in any cheap means, you must 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 this planet.”

As wild as it will be to reinvent the stabilizer and the change simply to make a number of 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 obtainable in Topre keyboards.

“The Seneca is supposed to be this very dense sound-absorbing keyboard, a extra deep thocky type 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 most likely be a 60-key HHKB-layout keyboard. It might need Bluetooth. And he’s considering of doing it in both milled polycarbonate or solid carbon fiber, if he can pull that off. “The sound signature will probably be radically totally different. The load will probably be radically totally different. And we’ll optimize for the alternative of every part we optimize for on the Seneca.”

There are such a lot of extra fascinating issues for Norbauer to sort out. 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 simpler one — a number of firms have approached him about getting it into manufacturing, but it surely wants a bit extra R&D first.

Simply don’t ask for a timeline. It’ll be executed when it’s executed.