Norbauer Seneca review: a $3,600 luxury keyboard for the keyboard obsessed
The best, and most expensive, thing I’ve ever typed on. | Photo by Nathan Edwards / The Verge
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 …