The AI wearables are always listening

25:03And that's fine in a way because it's anonymous. You're not describing who these people are. but it captures names it captures projects it like capture that two people somewhere in the Vox media office were talking about big cat sanctuaries on a day in February and that I had no business knowing this but I overheard it and they don't know it I know it and you just sit there with that knowledge and how like immense it feels and how icky you feel having perpetrated it on someone that no amount of disclosure can really fully make you feel right again having done it you feel like a spy like it's a weird transition to these ai wearables like the smart glasses that can record the ai recorders that listen to everything um i'm getting a pair of the nuanced audio glasses that like enhance your hearing and the lens crafters lady um sat there and she's like oh so you're signing up for our latest spyware tool you're gonna hear everything And I was like, what?

26:04Oh, oh, God. Am I just on like the spy beat now? It's frightening on some some degree because I consider myself a person who thinks about the ethics of it quite deeply. But I just know there are people who are not. Do you think there's a version of this thing that works for you? And I think like take the sort of we are journalists who record our interactions with people a lot out of it because that is like true and valuable, but kind of a niche use case, right? Like most people do not need to record that kind of thing all day, every day. But lots of people have meetings. Lots of people need to remember things from class, things like that.

26:44Like, is there a is there a turn in kind of either the like ethical approach or the sort of way that you use this thing that would make you feel better about them? I think if it could just listen to me, my voice only and differentiate my voice only. And the thing that I was most attracted to for using this was the to-dos. I am constantly like, yep, got this, got that, going to get this back to you. And I write maybe 70 % of them, which means 30 % someone has to come back and go, did you do the thing? And go, I'm such a forgetful person. But then it really just has to negotiate the knowledge and the human wisdom of knowing what's important to remember and what is very important to forget.

27:30Because forgetting is a survival mechanism as well, emotionally and for a lot of different things. And the AI is like, I will remember everything. Yeah, and I think before I started these tests, I would have guessed it's like, you know, 50-50 throughout the day, right? Stuff that's, even if it's just tuned to my own voice, stuff that's interesting and important, lots of that. also stuff that is uninteresting and unimportant and it can throw it away and actually i think it's like it's like five percent important 95 throw away and i think the actual value of these things will come from proactively throwing away the correct 95 it's just that that's a really hard technical problem and so none of these things want to try making that assumption because if they get it wrong it kills the whole value of the thing right so they seem very happy to just overshare everything all the time in service of having the one thing that you're looking for.

28:21And that just creates a lot of labor for you. Right. To get a little philosophical here, part of the human mission is trying to decide what is important in your own life. And we have dedicated millions of human hours to like, what is the right answer to that question? I think it's a little silly to expect that AI would be able to do that when emotionally it's not very intelligent at this point in time. Who knows if it will ever be? But it's like, I think we talk a lot about how AI is smart. We don't ever talk about whether AI is wise. So it's sort of like, I need AI to be a little wise if it's going to help me, because that's actually what I'm looking for.

29:01Maybe I'm not looking for an assistant. Maybe I'm looking for my own Mr. Miyagi to point me in the right direction. And an AI Mr. Miyagi is a lot harder than I think we're like ready to acknowledge at this point in time. All right. I do. I just want to leave you with the best thing that has happened to me. And then we're going to get out of here. So this morning, my two year old son has been up since three o 'clock this morning. So I just left the pendant on all morning. We're hanging out. And here is just a chunk of our day as described by the Limitless app. Going to the playground and observing a garbage truck, suggesting a trip to the playground, pointing out a garbage truck, expressing awe, identifying a garbage truck again, discussing going to the playground, identifying a garbage truck.

29:44Which, A, unbelievably good description of my point. And it's like, there's a little bit of that that I really enjoyed. It can play some of the audio of him pointing at a garbage truck and yelling garbage truck. And that's nice. But just give me that. Forget all the rest of this stuff. Just give me my son saying garbage truck over and over and I will pay for this thing. And I'll be happy about it. It's the best experience I've had with any AI product ever is just the thing that shows me the recording of my son yelling at garbage trucks. Garbage truck. Yeah. It's the dream. There's the AI solution right there.

30:18That's all we need. All right, V, thank you as always. Thanks for having me. All right, we got to take a break and then we're going to come back and we're going to talk about keyboards. We're going to talk a lot about keyboards. We'll be right back.

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33:53All right, we're back. Before we get into the next segment, let me just explain to you a little bit about the keyboard that we're about to talk about. It's called the Seneca. It's made by a guy named Ryan Norbauer, who we're about to talk to and you're going to hear a lot from. This keyboard is$3 ,600. And the only way I can explain it is it's this sort of giant, heavy monolith of a mechanical keyboard. It has gray keys around the sides. And for the numbers, it has a couple of these really lovely sort of salmon-colored accent keys. The thing weighs, I think, seven pounds. You can buy it in a bunch of different finishes.

34:32It has this huge sort of thunky metal casing. I mean, it's a truly lovely keyboard. And it is the product of this guy, Ryan Norbauer, building himself the perfect keyboard. You're going to hear a lot about switches, which are essentially the actual mechanism that moves the key up and down. You're going to hear a lot about keycaps. You're going to hear a lot about the force that gets applied and the brass plate underneath. All of these are like the sort of component parts of a keyboard that most people never think about. But they're actually individual pieces that you can buy and put together and tune and reshape and rethink and you can invent your own.

35:12And they're made by different companies. There's different ideas about how all this stuff works. The keyboard world, frankly, is much bigger and much wider than I ever realized. And so Ryan's story is just what it looks like to go through it and find the exact right thing for you, no matter what, no matter how complicated, no matter how expensive. And I think it's really cool. And it was really fun to talk to him about not only what this keyboard is, but why it is this way and why it was worth the work to make a$3 ,600 keyboard. I don't think I'll be buying this keyboard, but I love that it exists and I really enjoyed talking about it.

35:47So you're going to hear from Nathan Edwards on our team, and you're going to hear from Ryan Norbauer. Let's get into it. Nathan Edwards, welcome back to the Vergecast. Hi, David. Hey, buddy. Ryan Norbauer, welcome. Thanks so much for inviting me. We are here to talk about very expensive keyboards, and I'm very excited about this. So, Ryan, a thing you should know, you've known Nathan a long time. Nathan's a keyboard guy. I would say I'm keyboard curious. I know nothing. I'm on a keyboard switches for beginners website right now that I was using to prepare for this podcast. I know nothing, but I am fascinated.

36:22And so this is the energy we are all bringing to this, and I'm very excited to talk about it. Welcome to the fold. I'm happy to report that you don't have to start with a$3 ,600 keyboard. There are many excellent options now. It's like, especially since COVID, the options available have really transformed. It's never been a better time to get started as a keyboard enthusiast, for sure. So, Ryan, I think mostly what I want to do is sort of talk about your story and your descent into, I don't know, something like madness trying to build this keyboard. But I kind of want to start at the beginning.

36:52You've been working on keyboards for a long time. Why keyboards? How did you get sort of into this world in the first place? I feel like once you're in the keyboard world, it just pulls you deeper and deeper and deeper. But most people seem to have a story about kind of why they got into keyboards in the first place. What's yours? Sure. So, I mean, there's two phases to that, I guess. There's why keyboards as an object, and then there's why keyboards as like a profession and community, and those were actually, you know, different for me. My actual enthusiasm about keyboards per se as objects and devices stretches back to like the fifth grade when I was first learning to program on an Apple IIe, learning Apple Basic in my school room, and was very excited about the future of technology.

37:37And, you know, this was in sort of the late 80s, early 90s period, running into, you know, when I was in high school into the beginning of the internet. And there was just this immense culture of optimism around the future in general, and specifically how computing would transform our relationship with other humans on this planet, and sort of interconnect us and make us, you know, as individuals more capable of doing more interesting things. And for whatever reason, that idea really captured my imagination as a kid. And so just the memory of my first experience typing on an Apple IIe or an IBM buckling spring keyboard, and just this period of extreme excitement when I was a kid about computing, correlated with a time when computing hardware was rarer and treated as more valuable.

38:30and therefore, you know, manufacturers could invest more in making them actually satisfying and durable. So they were not commodity products. And so they had a certain sound and feel to them that I associate with that kind of techno excitement, you know. And so that's the original spark. And I think for most of us who have weird sort of enduring obsessions as adults, they usually spark in childhood. But it wasn't until probably the, you know, maybe 2009, 2010, when I discovered that there was a whole online subculture of people who are really into this too. And most of us who came to it at that time, and I think to some extent still, had that same spark about keyboards having that vintage quality.

39:14And it's why we're sort of drawn to what are somewhat vaguely described as mechanical keyboards. It's a kind of slippery and maybe not entirely accurate term, especially in the case of my keyboard, because it's hybrid capacitive and mechanical. but nevertheless the term came to be called mechanical keyboards but i think a more accurate term would be like vintage feeling or vintage style keyboards um and so you know i discovered this community of intense enthusiasm on the internet there was a website still is called geek hack which still looks like it was programmed in 1998 if you check it out um but is a very like positive and interesting community of people especially in those early days and it was very small too it was like i don't know maybe a thousand people on geek hack or something maybe nathan has researched this and could give us actual figures but uh you know it was very very small not that long ago um and now you know i go to keyboard meetups like the seattle keyboard meetup is over a thousand people i think the last time i i went to it and there's just like one in san diego i think also was uh in the four figures for sure and so you can regularly find people all around the world who know about this but like even 10 or 15 years ago this was a extremely obscure, weird thing that nobody knew anything about.

40:25And it was mostly people, with the exception of people building their own keyboards out of ceramic switches and a few vendors, it was mostly people restoring old keyboards, like the IBM Buckling Spring is this sort of legendary keyboard in this space and whatever. So anyway, I found these people. I realized that these people are my people in a very weird way. And I got really kind of deeply involved in that community. So where does the Seneca story start in all of that? Because you were making housings and sort of building around building your own full keyboard here for a while. But then, at what point are you like, it is time to make my own creation?

41:04I didn't intend for this to even be a business in the first place. I kind of stumbled into it because I was making my own keyboard housing for myself. You know, I took a machining class at the artisan's asylum in boston and i learned how to do uh milling of metal on an old bridgeport mill from world war ii right and so this is not a scalable process i just literally you know i had been learning these because another one of my hobbies is making replicas of props from science fiction particularly star trek and i want i like i took these classes in order to learn how to like i want to make dr crusher's laser scalpel you know and then uh and i did all those things and i realized hey actually maybe i could make one of these keyboard housings that i like so much now that I know a little bit of metalwork.

41:44So the very first one, I prototyped on that mill, totally manual, no CNC. And I'm like, oh, okay, I guess this actually works. But the surface finishes I was able to get out of the machine were pretty poor, mostly because of my inexperience as a machinist. And so I wanted to get the same design made, which I had proved by prototyping at a factory that knows how to actually machine things and then bead blast them to a uniform surface finish and then anodize them. And so I did what people did and still do on GeekHack all the time, which is I started a group buy, which is, you know, in order to buy one thing for yourself, you order 10 so that you can kind of split the costs among other people.

42:27And so the first one was just one literally made for myself. And then the second one was a very small batch that I did on GeekHack. And for whatever reason, that just kind of like caught on and people kept asking me to do it again and again and again. And then I realized that there was much more of an appetite for this kind of thing than I thought. And so I started using the resources from each subsequent run to do more creatively interesting things. And so an obvious conclusion from that is to move from just making aftermarket housings, which is pretty limited in scope because it's a very sort of DIY project.

43:04It's a big ask of people to buy a keyboard from Japan and wait six months for it. sometimes they're not even available uh avoid the warranty take it apart put it inside like only so many people on earth are going to be willing to do that so the obvious idea for if if you're interested in creative possibilities is like make your own keyboard the whole thing like because then you can control every aspect of the experience um and so i knew i think pretty early on maybe the first few years that that would be the fun and interesting thing to do but i knew that there were a lot of skills and abilities that i had to acquire in order to get to the point of being able to do that.

43:38And so I had various intermediate projects of increasing technical ambition that sort of got me to that place. So, you know, sometimes I vacillate between whether this was like a project that took me 10 years to do or five years. So like 10 years to learn everything and to get to this point. But I think I only started actively working on the Seneca as a like a named project. You know, what became this keyboard about five or six years ago. Nathan, when you've mentioned Ryan's name to me like years ago, when did you first become aware of of this man and his many goings on were you a were you a heavy grail user uh i still to this day actually do not own any norbauer housings um i knew about i think he first came onto my radar pretty early when you did the um you did these galaxy class keycaps which ended up being officially licensed eventually but i think i heard about them back when they were a little bit bootleg well they weren't bootleg because so there this is a star trek inspired key set they had no ip on them.

44:37That's correct. They were just like inspired by the graphic design user interfaces of Star Trek The Next Generation. Right. They weren't Star Trek, they were Star Trek ish. Exactly. Yeah, I got you. Exactly. I was actually a columnist for Tested for a couple of years back in the day. Oh, cool. And then I worked with Ryan at Wirecutter. Doesn't matter. Anyway, it's not a doubt about that. Then you made a housing called the Heavy 6 for the Leopold FC 660C, which is to this day the best keyboard known to man, in my humble opinion. This is mine. So Ryan made a housing. He put it up for a group buy.

45:12I saw it on GeekHack during the interest check. And then I was like, okay, there was a week where in a fit of mania, I ordered a heavy six. I ordered a keycap set called GMK Space Cadet for a different kind of keycaps. And I ordered a minivan, which is a 40 % keyboard, much too small for me. And then like three days later, I had to go cancel all three of those things because I'm like, I don't need the keycaps and I don't want my keyboard to be five pounds. But in the process of emailing Ryan to be like, hey, can I actually, it was very embarrassing. Can I actually cancel my order for this beautiful thing that you've made that I realized I don't actually want because I specifically, I used to throw this thing in my back, it was a keycap.

45:56I used to throw it in my backpack to take it on planes. Like if I was traveling for more than a couple days for work, I'd take my keyboard with me. And I can't do that if it weighs five pounds and it's going to like break your laptop. So I emailed him to cancel. He was very nice about it. We exchanged like five or six emails back then and then talked about Star Trek, talked about keyboards. He mentioned actually starting this project to make a ready to type keyboard. And then like six years later, when I heard about the Seneca, I just shamelessly necroed. I just replied to that thread from my now work email address.

46:34I'm like, hey, remember me? Can I check out your keyboard? So let's talk about those six years. Part of this process that I'm fascinated by is like, it's very clear that you went in and were like, I'm going to build the best keyboard. Like, end of sentence, right? Is that a fair characterization? Like, you weren't thinking the best keyboard for whatever price, the best keyboard with whatever specs. You're like, I am going to build myself the best keyboard. Is that where it started? Absolutely. But there's an important caveat there or an acknowledgement that we must make, which is that the definition of the best keyboard is enormously subjective.

47:06Yes. Right. And so it's my definition of the best keyboard. And I've rigorously held to that, but with the acknowledgement that other people will probably not agree about some of those choices, but that other people, certainly, and the sort of people who I think were inclined to like my old products would also agree, okay, that's pretty much what I would have done if I had to go from scratch and engineer everything. So it's subjective. Right. So that thing is the sort of subjectivity of it is what I'm really interested in because how much of that could you have sort of sat down and made a list of on that first day where you're Here is what I know I want out of this keyboard that is still true today of the Seneca that you finished.

47:52Did you know what the perfect keyboard for you was when you set out to build this thing? That's an interesting question. Nobody's asked me that before. And I think it's interesting because I think my answer is yes. I did know exactly where I wanted to end up. The only thing I didn't know is how I would get there and how incredibly circuitous and challenging the path to get to that place would be. I wanted something that was electrocapacitive and had this like very vintage sound to it, but was an acoustic improvement on anything that was out there. I wanted something that had a more tighter on-axis key feel relative to existing capacitive keyboards out there and that really like hyper-engineered the acoustic and tactile nuances of the board and also just had this kind of retrofuturist visual aesthetic that viscerally appeals to me.

48:39Like, that's probably what I'm sure that's what I would have told you at the time. And I think that's what we actually are shipping right now. Okay. And this is kind of a question for both of you. And this is where I start to reveal how little I know about keyboards. How much of that stuff is subjective versus objective? Like talking about the sort of tactility and the sound and the way it feels to use. Like, are those numbers you can write down and dial in? or is that just something you're going to sit there and touch a hundred keys and one of them feels right and you go, it's that one? I'll let Nathan answer that one.

49:13He knows the MX world much better than I do. Like Nathan, you spend all your time with keyboards. Is this, how objective can you be about this stuff? There are people who will publish force curve graphs and they'll be like, oh, well, this switch has this amount of, you know, this actuation force, this amount of return. People try to quantify it. I think for me and for a lot of people, it's just about how it feels and how it looks and how it sounds. Like, does it feel good? Does it sound good? That is subjective. Objective is, is the space bar rattle-y? Is there a crunch? Does the keycap hit the housing of the switch before it finishes its travel?

49:56is there like do you when you press it down do you hear like do you hear it when the key smacks against the pcb or the stabilizer smacks against the pcb do you hear upstroke clack when you let go as the the slider slams into the housing whether or not you like those things or care about those things is subjective whether they happen is objective i think uh you know it's like any human thing, it falls sort of along a normal distribution. And there is a kind of objectivity, especially in, like Nathan said, the things that sound bad, right? And people tend to agree more on things that they don't like rather than the things that they proactively do.

50:36And so there's, as with so many things in life, most of the gains in improving something come not from like adding something great, but removing bad things. And so that was sort of the obvious this initial low-hanging fruit of this project is find all of the things that people generally agree sound bad and make sure there are no possible sources of that in this keyboard, right? And so you actually, it's not that objectivity doesn't exist in a sense in the keyboard world. And I certainly noticed that, especially if you talk to people who aren't, like who don't go to meetups all the time and who aren't on the mechanical keyboard subrider all day.

51:13If I just lay a Seneca in front of a random person and I have one where the switch plate is aluminum and one where the switch plate is brass, everyone, literally everyone will say they prefer the brass plate, which is why ours has a brass plate. Because I actually personally sort of, in some ways, like the more noisy aluminum one because it's more like retro nostalgic for me. But everybody's like, oh, that's obviously better. And so that is a kind of objectivity, but a lot of that is just removing something that people perceive as unpleasant. and like this sort of pinginess. I think one general trend you could describe that's pretty common or uniform across individuals is a preference for deeper pitches.

51:56People don't like high-pitched, pingy, medley-sounding things or like rattly, like thin-walled plastic sounds. Right, that's probably a good way to reduce the quest of the keyboard community for the past two decades is to move away from those things, which were sort of the default of like a Dell keyboard you might buy in 2005, right? And so there is a kind of objectivity. But then once you get into the nuance of like what switch type, what switch curve, things then become immensely subjective. And people do try to characterize them with things like force curves. But it's like you can make a waveform of the Beatles and Bach and look at it and be like, yeah, they're objectively different.

52:40But what do you do with that graph, right? You have to hear it and be like, oh, I like that or I don't like it. And, you know, I just make keyboards for people who like electrocapacitive, which has a very distinctive sort of thocky, clacky, vintage sound signature, just because that's what I like. did you have a sort of specific reference thing in mind like you mentioned you know some of those vintage keywords like did you have one in mind that you're like this is this is the gold standard of one part of this or another or are you purely sort of going by what you like and what feels right to you as you as you're building through it i think it's uh in many ways i always come back to my vague impressions of what the old Apple Alps keyboards were.

53:24Because that's what I, really the keyboard that I had the first emotional, or computer that I had the first emotional relationship with, you might say. But those are really not, they're not as good as a keyboard switch can be. I, when I first discovered that there was this community called GeekHack around keyboard customization around 2010 or whatever, I got very excited because most of it was around Cherry MX type switches, which are certainly the most prevalent and well-known, probably, if your listeners are sort of casually familiar with keyboards, almost all of them would have been Cherry MX, right?

53:55And so I got very excited about that. I got into them. I tried every single switch that was available at the time, including sourcing them from, you know, Asia and getting people to like swap the springs and the sliders and do all sorts of crazy stuff. But somehow I just stumbled into keyboards from this Japanese company called Topra, which were in no way made for enthusiasts. They were made for industrial applications to be highly durable and to sort of survive many actuations without changing their performance, right? And they just happen, I think, to be accidentally really good. If you like that kind of feeling that I associate with those vintage Apple keyboards, even though they're not the same.

54:33And one thing I've seen you say a few times is that part of the process here was about constantly like forced to choose between the thing that is more like, you know, efficient or economical or whatever. And the thing that feels right, you just kept choosing the thing that felt right. And part of me wonders if you just intentionally kept choosing the thing that was more expensive. And I want to talk about that because there is a thing here. And like I was reading your blog and stuff, and I think you seem to have this real appreciation for sort of things that are like deliberately luxurious. and so I think like I guess this is a long way of asking would you like this keyboard as much if it cost you a third of the price to make but also like what did those trade-offs look like like give me an example of something where you're faced with okay I could do this the easy way or and the economical way or the straightforward way or I could do this the way that's going to take longer and cost more and be harder and you just have to like bite the bullet and go that way uh yeah so that's a very deep and nuanced question I have lots of thoughts about it so I'm happy to blabber about it for a while it is very commonly the case that people uh when they pay a lot for something will rationalize that it's great right um and that's there's obviously that danger in luxury goods and uh i i'm very like i'm a very uncomfortable relationship even with calling my product a luxury product in a way um because much of what advertises itself as uh the luxury industry these days is very much not.

56:04It's just not my good definition of what luxury should be. It's capitalizing on that phenomenon of simply like, let's start with the price and work backwards towards the perception of value, right? And let's sort of sell it as a status object and then figure out how to make it as cheaply as conceivably possible. There is a more reasonable, there's this French business theorist named Jean-Noël Capfreur. And I really like his book called The Luxury Strategy. And he kind of analyzes the industry as like, luxury is a way of facilitating the low volume manufacturing of creatively interesting goods, right?

56:43It's a business model for low volume, for doing things that most people wouldn't want to buy. And that I find actually very compelling. As I said, in some ways, this business grew up accidentally, and it was just sort of for fun. So I think it's a viable business model and business strategy. And it's a nice, therefore, I can like plausibly rationalize doing what I wanted to do anyway, which was to make the cool and interesting thing, which oftentimes correlates with being more expensive, but it's certainly not so for its own sake. There are advantages to selling things that are expensive, I will say.

57:23So one thing, for example, is it just like, it sort of filters out people who just don't care, right? And who are going to just like whine about dumb shit or about, you know, it just like, it sort of filters out a lot of the internet entitlement, like, because people were just not going to buy that thing. Like, it's the people who are seriously engaged with us about buying our stuff like they actually really think keyboards are cool and are very excited about what we're doing um because otherwise why would you even be considering spending so much money on a keyboard uh so nathan i'm gonna make you do a very uncomfortable thing which is explain a product to the person who made the product uh but i think i think this will be fun so i like what is it about the seneca that makes it interesting other than the fact that it is just a keyboard that costs 3600 which i think to to ryan's point is not sufficiently interesting in and of itself it It has to be interesting anyway, and then we can talk about the price.

58:16The thing that I think is most interesting about the Seneca, as a keyboard nerd myself, is the switches and the stabilizers. The fact that Ryan just went out and developed your own Topra-style switch that is better than Topra in measurable ways and developed your own stabilizers. and you're just like, I'm just going to fire the cash bazooka at the stabilizer problem until it's solved. That to me is the interesting thing about the Seneca. It is a fantastic keyboard to type on. Like it is, it's a joy to use. The things there, the things about the Seneca you've said is like, this is the keyboard for you.

58:57It's 10 keyless or it's a 10 keyless layout. You know, it's a flat slab. It's not the layout for everybody. It's the layout for you. The finish is great. It looks like stone. It feels amazing. That part is, that's like a straight line from where you started to just like be like, hey, here's my keyboard. By the way, I invented new switches. I invented new stabilizer. And like those, and those things are good is the punchline. Like they're very good. That's what's so cool about the Seneca to me. Full disclosure, I cannot afford the Seneca. I will not be buying a Seneca. I think it's lovely. What does it weigh?

59:32Seven pounds, right? You said it weighs seven pounds, right? That's the one thing I want. Any keyboard that weighs seven pounds, I think, is inherently interesting. It's so heavy. Yeah, most of the weight comes from the brass switch plate, actually. And that is, it's actually, you know, the keyboard is maybe a little bit heavier than I would have chosen it to be. It's just that the plate is brass for acoustic reasons. I would, again, if we had made it out of aluminum, the keyboard overall would have been much less heavy. um but you know i i think there's an interesting analogy to draw here uh from what nathan was saying which is i my mental model i think for what i do in keyboards is very much like uh mechanical watches like you know the not in terms of the actual mechanical details necessarily but the sort of social uh commercial uh cultural role that they play is that everybody has a computer in their pocket that will tell them the time.

1:00:33A mechanical watch is completely superfluous in 2025. And yet there's this enormous, you know, industry and culture of people who are very excited about and derive enormous pleasure from mechanical watches. If you guys ever, you know, the website Hodinkee, it's like an entire publication dedicated to daily publishing extreme deep dives into this industry and how nerdy and how excited people can get about it. And there are people who, yes, absolutely very wealthy people who are super into it, but also just very nerdy people who are super into it. And all for a thing that is totally unnecessary and just a way of, you know, adding a little bit of joy and satisfaction and something to be excited about in our otherwise boring daily computer-based lives, right?

1:01:19And I think that actually is pretty analogous. Like, in no way am I pretending that this solves an essential or important problem other than, you know, the, I suppose, actually deeply essential and important problem of like having something to give a shit about in life for a little while, right? Yeah, I was going to say, I don't think any of that is like, there's a sort of utilitarian superfluousness to it, but there is also something like deeply essential about like, I have this thing on my watch and it means something to me that is like powerful stuff. Yeah, so I acknowledge being at both ends of that spectrum, and I think that's just okay.

1:01:57Because, you know, as Nathan pointed out, like, this is an optional purchase. It's not compulsory. No one is required to buy it. The stuff that's happening in the low end of premium keyboards is really interesting right now, and it's never been a better time to be getting into keyboards and having that be more accessible, I'm extremely in favor of. I'm just doing another thing, and I think it's okay for there to be a diversity of things in the world. does this feel like the end of a project or the beginning of one? It's both for sure. I mean, if I, if I'm fortunate, uh, then it's both. If it's just the end, well, that's fine.

1:02:32And I'm happy with the white I made. And that's, you know, maybe, uh, people aren't interested in it and that's fine. But so far, you know, we've already done the, uh, a first edition offering, uh, and it's almost entirely sold out. So, uh, it's probably the beginning of something. Uh, I do have a lot of interesting ambitions for what we could do. do after this keyboard and some of that does involve uh catering to tastes that aren't necessarily exactly my own so i think in terms of the subjective sound signature and tactility of the switch that will remain but as we've discussed there are people who prefer different layouts of keyboards uh smaller especially more compact keyboards like nathan wants to be able to have a keyboard he could put in his backpack and take with him while traveling but still have it be a huge upgrade over a laptop keyboard, right?

1:03:17And I, you know, even in LA here, I see people with, who bring mechanical keyboards to cafes and put it on top of their laptop because they want a more satisfying experience. I would like to enable that. And so in some ways to make a keyboard that is the opposite of the Seneca. The Seneca is this sort of, you know, desk monolith that weighs seven pounds and is optimized for a certain sound signature that I really like. But it would be interesting for me to go all the way in the other direction to make one that's instead of more like deep and thocky a little bit more what might be described as clacky where you have a more resonant housing that's made up out of some type of polymer like cnc machine polycarbonate or we're i'm actually really interested in forged carbon fiber if we can figure out some way to do that in a economically viable way where you have housing that is actually really high aesthetic quality but is light and durable and that would also involve injection molding a switch plate like I described on the heavy grail, so that it would also impart an entirely different sound signature to the board by giving it a polycarbonate plate.

1:04:23And we just know from existing keyboards in the enthusiast world that that radically changes the sound signature in a way that some people really like and some people don't like. But it would be a way of answering those desires that are a little bit differently tuned from my own desires. And I find that interesting because they're hiding around all of those corners i know is a bunch of weird and interesting technical challenges which tends to be the thing that actually gets me excited wouldn't it be fun to go the other way and be like what is the cheapest possible pretty good thing i could do like i'm gonna make a 49 mechanical keyboard and it's gonna rule norb by norbauer no no the trouble is everyone has that so covered right like yeah this is the there's been this especially since the covet era when everybody was doing work from home there's just been this massive surge of people into that space like there was a time when i was thinking about doing stuff like that but at this point everybody like everyone can do that much better than i can that's just not my specialty uh is you know operating at scale and that kind of optimization so i think i'll probably just keep on doing my thing uh and i'm i'm okay with that so in short everybody else has that well covered yeah which puts you in a fun place you get to go you get to go do the weird stuff it's great uh all right ryan nathan we've kept you long enough Thank you both for doing this.

1:05:37This was really, really fun. I really appreciate it. Thanks, David. Thank you for asking. All right, we got to take one more break and then we're going to come back and take a question from the Vergecast hotline. Be right back.

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1:07:35All right, we're back. Let's do a question from the Vergecast hotline. As always, the number is 866-VERGE-11. You can email vergecasts at theverge.com. Please keep sending us party speakers. We love the party speakers. But keep reaching out about anything and everything. There's actually a lot of really complicated news going on. And even just getting questions from all of you has been really instructive on how we should be talking about and covering this stuff. So please know that when you call or you email, even if we don't explicitly reference it on the show, and we try to do lots of them here on the show, it matters, and it makes the show better all the time, and we are incredibly grateful to everybody who reaches out.

1:08:11This week, I want to play two questions that both have kind of the same answer, and I'll explain that in a second. Let me just play them really quick. Here we go. Hey, I'm Dave, and I have a question. I'm a teacher, and my students use Google Chromebooks, and on them they use Google Docs and Google Drive and Google Sheets and they submit assignments in Google Classroom and there are probably millions of other students in the world that do this. So if Google gets forced to split from Chrome, what happens to students, Chromebooks, Google Apps for Education and that whole ecosystem. That's it. That's my question.

1:09:03Thanks, guys. Okay, so we have a question about what happens to Chromebooks if Google is forced to sell Chrome as the result of this search antitrust trial. Hold on to that one. We also have a question from Jason. Hey, this is Jason from Nova Scotia. From the recent podcast, you guys were talking about Chrome. I'm glad you guys mentioned Chromium, but I did have one thought and I still don't really know how it would go. So even if they're able to pry Chromium away from Google, and unless they explicitly stated in the remedies that they weren't allowed to make another browser, I wonder what would stop Google from just making a second browser.

1:09:40Because I think you could make the argument that what people like about Chrome isn't actually just that it's good, it's that it's part of Google. And I think, I would think that none of the passwords or bookmarks or all the stuff that people have with their Google account would just go with it. So like what would stop me just making Chrome 2, this time more blue, electric boogaloo, or God forbid the biggest sideswipe forking Firefox and then making another browser with that. Yes, yes, I know. Yeah, let me know your thoughts because unless I explicitly stated that, I would just think they'd make another browser and maybe they even already have.

1:10:20Who knows? Anyways, thanks. Bye. Okay, so there's a simple answer and a complicated answer to these two questions. The simple answer in both cases is that Google would have to get out of the browser business. I think the DOJ, what it has asked for specifically, would prevent Google from making another browser. It's that simple, right? And so what that looks like is Google just wouldn't own a browser. Chrome would be its own thing. Somebody would buy Chrome. a name I keep hearing floated is OpenAI as the company with the most interest and money to pull this off. But let's say OpenAI owns Chrome.

1:10:58All of that goes to Chrome. The Chromium project, I think, is slightly more complicated because it is technically an open source thing. So it could either be administered by a new company that cares about it in the way that Google has cared about it, or it could completely languish. Or best case scenario, it becomes a truly open source project. The fact that it is an open source project essentially run by Google means for all intents and purposes, it's not an open source project. It's a Google project that anyone can download. And I've heard from a lot of people who make browsers that actually the idea of it being a more equitable thing that everyone agrees, this is what we want to build browsers on, but we can't let it be run by one company.

1:11:40That could be a good thing. You have that would be something more along the lines of like what the matter consortium is doing, right, where they say this is a group of companies who agree that this is a thing we need to build together and it'll benefit everybody. Could be great. But the way that it has worked until now is that Google has done the vast majority of the work. We talked a little bit about this on Friday's show, but Sundar Pashai, the CEO of Google, said during the trial that Google, I think, is responsible for 94 percent of the code commits over the last year to Chromium. It does most of the work.

1:12:10It has most of the people. It provides most of the funding. It is very much a Google project. So I think Google would not be allowed to use it to build another browser. I think the question of whether Google would be allowed to be part of building Chromium is separate. But again, if Google can't build a browser, why would it continue to invest in Chromium? Would OpenAI or whoever else invest in Chromium? Who knows? The Chrome OS piece of it is, in a certain way, just as simple. Google would have to get rid of Chrome OS. Chrome OS is Chrome. It is part of Chrome. There is Chrome tech inside of it.

1:12:43And if Google were to get rid of that, it would lose it. Whether it had to officially sell Chrome OS and the Chromebook business to somebody, if Google can't do Chrome, it can't do Chrome OS. It's pretty much just that simple. And so that is another thing that would essentially get thrown out with this deal. Now, this is why this is complicated, right? Right after Sundar Pashai testified, there was an expert who basically came in and said, I don't even know that it is technically feasible to divest Chrome from Google. And it's for all the reasons that these two callers are describing. What Chrome holds is not just a window to look at a web page, right?

1:13:23Like we think about it as you open Chrome and it's an interface to Google search. And it is that, But it also holds a ton of data about your bookmarks and your passwords. And it has a lot of history and it has an entire operating system built around it that millions of students use all over the place. Chrome is baked into the fabric of Google, and the fabric of Google is baked into Chrome in many more ways than I realized. I mean, think about Android. Chrome is the default browser on Android, and what would essentially happen is that there would be no default browser on Android. Like, by the letter of the law here, Google would not be able to make a browser that came bundled with Android.

1:14:05That just doesn't make any sense. Like, your phone should come with a web browser. How are you going to download a web browser? It just sort of boggles the mind. So what Google has argued is that A, Chrome is not a piece of the search business and that fundamentally this trial is about the search business. I don't find that nearly as compelling as the other part of the argument, which is Google says we can't divest Chrome because it is all over Google. It would be like saying, get rid of, I don't know, HTML inside of Google. Like, it just doesn't work. It's not a thing you can do. and increasingly that is a thing that is coming up from a bunch of different sides in the trial that it's not as simple as Google makes a web browser, take that web browser and give it to somebody else, sell it to somebody else for$20 billion or whatever the number turns out to be.

1:14:52That actually Chrome and its many offshoots, again, which is Chromium, which powers lots of other browsers, it's Chrome OS, it's Chrome on Android, it's Chrome on desktop, it's Chrome everywhere. It would just change the nature of how Google works and all of Google's products. And a lot of the underlying tech inside of Chrome powers other things. Chromium is hugely important, not just to other browsers, but across the web. And you could make the case that a lot of things kind of fall apart as soon as Chrome does. That is obviously Google's case. And I think so far, just from sitting in the courtroom, I think the judge, Amit Medev, finds that fairly compelling.

1:15:32But we'll see. It's possible that Google is going to have to sell Chrome. we've seen there are a lot of companies lining up to buy it for obvious reasons. I mean, right, if you got Chrome and the Chromebook line in the deal, that becomes pretty interesting. You buy not just the most important browser, but one of the most important operating systems. That becomes really meaningful. But then Chromebooks without the access to the rest of Google, probably less valuable. This is why this is all so messy and so intertwined. And this is the thing we're seeing in all of these trials, that it's not just as simple as like a company has several parts.

1:16:07You cleave off one of the parts and give it to somebody else. All this stuff is so intermingled and intertwined that figuring out how to pull it apart is in many ways the real challenge of the antitrust fight. We'll see. There's lots still to come there, and I would not rule out the possibility that Google is going to have to figure out how to do that pulling apart, but it's going to be really complicated and it's going to have vastly bigger ramifications than just when you open a new tab in Chrome, it shows OpenAI and not Google. We'll see. Lots and lots left to do there. All right, that is it for the VergeCast today.

1:16:45Thank you to everybody who came on the show and thank you as always for listening. As ever, if you have questions, thoughts, feelings, I don't know, if you want to buy Chrome, if you've seen a party speaker, send us an email, vergecasttotheverge.com or call the hotline 866-VERGE-11. We really, truly love hearing from you. This show is produced by Will Poore, Eric Gomez, and Brandon Kiefer. The Vergecast is a Verge production, part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Neal and I will be back on Friday, presumably to talk about more antitrust stuff. We're getting a lot of new information about what's going on at the App Store.

1:17:12Lots of new stuff in the Meta and Google trials. Hopefully some other gadget news to talk about, because boy, have we talked a lot about courthouses the last couple of weeks. Hopefully more to come. We'll see you then. Rock and roll.

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