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After defining a new category with the original Switch, Nintendo is content sticking with what works.

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Photos by Amelia Holowaty Krales

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The first Switch was such a hit that Nintendo decided not to mess with a good thing. Instead of releasing a successor that feels like a generational leap or a pivot in a new direction, it’s following up the hugely successful original with the Switch 2 — a welcome upgrade that largely sticks to the formula. It looks about the same, works about the same, and plays most of the same games. It’s the Switch, just better.

Nintendo’s bet is that it doesn’t have to wow people all over again, and so it made a sequel that’s only as good as it needs to be. After spending a week with the new console, I’ve realized that good enough is exactly what the Switch needed.

Fundamentally, the concept of the Switch hasn’t changed. It’s still a tablet with a split controller stuck on either side, with a dock that connects to your television.

But the idea has been refined. The Switch 2 is much bigger, for one thing. It now has a 7.9-inch LCD panel, up from the original’s 6.2 inches, making it great for playing text-heavy games. It also means the entire device has become larger as a result, now weighing in at a comparatively hefty 1.18 pounds with the controllers attached. The larger size hasn’t bothered me, though your mileage may vary. My 12-year-old keeps stealing it to playPokémonand hasn’t complained. But she’ll do anything for more screentime.

Improved hardware and displayFaster load timesNew social featuresIt playsMario Kart

Disappointing battery lifeFew first-party Switch 2 games at launchNo standout feature

There are some other nice upgrades. Like the most recent OLED model of the original Switch, the Switch 2 has a kickstand that can prop the system up at a wide range of angles, and the updated version feels a little sturdier to me, making it great for playing in tabletop mode. It’s a huge improvement over the original Switch’s flimsy kickstand. The Switch 2 also adds a second USB-C port to the top of the console, which enables you to plug in a webcam for online play. It’s handy for attaching a charger or battery pack whichever way is most convenient, too.

What you get with that larger and heavier device is games that look and run better. The handheld’s screen has a 1920 x 1080 resolution, which supports HDR10 and VRR up to 120Hz. It’s bright and crisp, and games look a lot smoother thanks to the higher refresh rate. But I do missthe more vibrant OLED display of the most recent iteration of the original Switch, which featured deeper blacks and more contrast-y images. The new screen is a huge leap from the original, but it isn’t an all-around improvement if you’ve been using the OLED for a while.

The story is different when connected to your TV: the Switch 2 can finally output at 4K, with support for HDR10. You’ll need to play supported games to really take advantage of this, but it’s immediately noticeable how much crisper everything from text to gameplay is. HDR promises to make games more vibrant, though there doesn’t seem to be a standout game to show this off just yet.

Games are bigger this generation, too. Nintendo has increased the internal storage size to 256GB, but you’ll need to be diligent with how you use it;Cyberpunk 2077, for example, takes up 59GB on its own. Expanding that storage means buyinga new and relatively expensive microSD Express card; your old microSD cards won’t work.

More annoying is that the battery life is worse than the original Switch. Nintendo estimates between two and six and a half hours of gameplay on a single charge, and I found my device dying around the lower end of that spectrum, especially when playing more intensive games likeCyberpunk. That’s not a great sign for the future if the Switch 2 continues to get more demanding games.

Some of this owes to the fact that this is simply a much more capable console. It’s built around a new Nvidia chip, custom designed for the Switch 2, and offering modern features like DLSS and ray tracing. There’s more RAM. The internal storage is faster. This is why the Switch 2 is able to run a game as demanding asCyberpunk; it’s also why the Switch 2’s battery might die after a short two-hour stint.

The Switch 2 also has slightly redesigned Joy-Con controllers. They’re functionally mostly the same, but bigger and with a few small upgrades, like more subtle vibrations. They connect via magnets now, which are less fiddly than the previous rail design.Nintendo says that the joysticks have been redesigned, too, but they still aren’t using anti-drift Hall effect sensors. That means there’s a chance owners will once again be dealing with the dreaded Joy-Con drift that plagued the original Switch.

As similar as they are, the Joy-Con also introduces some of the truly new elements of the Switch 2.

To start, the right Joy-Con has an all-new button dedicated entirely to Nintendo’s GameChat social features. Chatting with friends while playing games isn’t a new concept, but Nintendo has finally made it not only a core but a relatively painless part of its user experience. You simply pull up the app, and you can see what friends are online and what they’re playing.

For the most part, it works as advertised. It’s easy to connect, voices come in clear through the Switch 2’s built-in mic, and video looks fine over the USB camera from Nintendo, which is sold separately. (The Switch 2 also supportsan unclear number of third-party webcams.) This is a huge upgrade over Nintendo’s old way of doing things, where you needed to download a separate Nintendo Switch Online app onto your phone and use that secondary device to chat.

The one flaw I’ve noticed with the new system is that screensharing — in which, for instance, four people can share their gameplay inMario Kart Worldwhile they race against each other — looks choppy and ugly, to the point that I stopped using it.

The redesigned Joy-Con controllers also introduce a new control option. By turning the Joy-Con on its side and placing it down on a flat surface, you’re able to use it like a mouse. Unfortunately, the Switch 2 doesn’t come with a next-gen version ofMario Paintto show all the mouse clicking possibilities, but I spent some time with the Switch 2 update ofCivilization VIIto test it out. And while it took some getting used to, I found the Switch 2’s mouse controls worked surprisingly well. This may not be as true in a twitchy first-person shooter where every millimeter matters, but for turn-based strategy, the mouse was a big improvement over a standard controller layout.

In a nice touch, using the mouse is seamless; you don’t choose the option from a menu, you simply turn the Joy-Con on its side, place it down, and it begins mouse mode. This makes it easy to swap between control options on the fly. You also don’t need to use the mouse on a completely flat surface like a table or desk. I was able to playCivjust fine moving the Joy-Con around on my thigh.

However, it wasn’t particularly comfortable to play that way for extended periods. So it’s hard to see it as something I’ll use often.

So yes, the Switch 2 is exactly what it sounds like hardware-wise: it takes a winning concept and improves on it in subtle ways, and mostly doesn’t mess with what already worked. None of the changes are a huge leap, nor are any of the issues dealbreakers.

Of course, the most important aspect of any system is its games. And the launch lineup for the Switch 2 is a combination of new titles that take advantage of the more powerful hardware and older games that have been updated and are noticeably better compared to the original Switch versions.

The best showcase for the console at launch isMario Kart World. It expands upon its predecessor in ways that Nintendo says weren’t possible on the original Switch. The game takes place in a large, connected open world and doubles the number of racers from 12 to 24. It’s bigger, more ambitious, and more chaotic than anyMario Kartbefore it, and yet it also runs incredibly well on the Switch 2. It loads fast and the frame rate holds up, even when playing four-player split-screen, which introduces a frankly absurd number of explosions and crashes on your TV at any given moment.

Outside of that, though, the first-party lineup is surprisingly thin.An impressive-lookingDonkey Konggame is coming, but it doesn’t launch until July, so the only other Nintendo-made release isNintendo Switch 2 Welcome Tour, an extremely drab collection of minigames and quizzes designed to teach you about the new console. It’s a nice idea, but the $10 collection is missingthe Nintendo charm that can even make folding cardboard into a fun experience.

That doesn’t mean there isn’t anything to play right now, though. There are just a few brand-new games. Many of the highlights of the Switch 2’s launch lineup are games that already exist on other platforms, but were likely too technically demanding for the original Switch. These include the likes ofCyberpunk 2077,Street Fighter 6, andYakuza 0, all of which look good, run smoothly, and load quickly. The new handheld is not as powerful as other current-generation consoles, let alone a high-end PC, but it’s still pretty remarkable being able to take Night City with you wherever you go, and have it feel good to play,instead of just fine.

Two of my favorite launch games take advantage of one of the Switch 2’s best features. Called GameShare, it lets you play select multiplayer games with anyone else nearby with a Switch 2 or original Switch, and it requires only one copy of the game. It’s not perfect — the second player is essentially streaming the game, and so the visual quality can dip at times — but it is a very fun way to enjoy co-op games that require a lot of coordination. I used it to play through a chunk ofSplit Fictionwith my wife, and a few hours ofSurvival Kidswith my, uh, kids, and it was a great alternative to couch co-op. We simply sat near each other, barking orders on what needed to be done next.

While the core launch lineup may be lacking, there are a lot of games that have been updated in a significant way to support the Switch 2. Some of these are paid upgrades; I dropped $10 to be able to use those mouse controls inCiv, and it’ll cost you the same to geta much smoother and faster-loading version ofBreath of the WildorTears of the Kingdom. These titles don’t look radically different, but they’re obviously sharper and running smoother; the faster loading times inZeldamay be worth the price of the upgrade alone.

Many of the free upgrades are just as impressive. I’ve been especially struck by games I’ve already played for hundreds of hours —FortniteandNo Man’s Sky— both of which struggled mightily on the original Switch. But on the Switch 2 they look like and play like, well, modern games.

Actually, my favorite launch games might be the oldest of all. One of the benefits for Nintendo Switch Online subscribers on the Switch 2 is the addition of GameCube games. To start, there are only three titles, but they’re excellent ones:The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker,Soulcalibur II(with Link as a playable fighter!), andF-Zero GX. It’s not exactly impressive that a sci-fi racer from 2003 plays fast and smooth on a modern console, but it’s still a nice bonus. And the GameCube has plenty of heavy hitters that will surely round out the service in the coming months. (Mario Kart: Double Dash, please.)

In 2017, there was nothing like the Nintendo Switch. At a time when dedicated handheld gaming devices had seemingly given way to smartphones, and the PS4 and Xbox One era was in full swing, here came Nintendo with an underpowered tablet that doubled as a home console in a way that was simple and intuitive. It proved to be such a success that it revitalized the company into a growing entertainment powerhouse.

But eight years later, there’s a lot like the Nintendo Switch 2. The original spearheaded a resurgence in portable gaming thanks to the likes ofValve,Sony, andXbox, and even upstarts likePanicandAnalogue. The Switch 2 not only has to compete with its predecessor, but also a maturing market of modern handhelds.

The Switch 2 doesn’t feel like the kind of generational leap typically associated with a new platform. When you put all of its features together — the larger display, more powerful internals, better social and sharing features, and more flexible control options — you are left with a device that is markedly better than its predecessor, but is still a step behind the latest PC handhelds in terms of pure horsepower and available games.

But even with real competition this time around, Nintendo is still operating largely in its own sphere. And it turns out good enough is more than good enough when you also have the biggestMario Kartto date.

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Nintendo has kept quiet about the device’s accessibility options, even though it’s off to a good start.

If you buy something from a Verge link, Vox Media may earn a commission.See our ethics statement.

Nintendo has kept quiet about the device’s accessibility options, even though it’s off to a good start.

If you buy something from a Verge link, Vox Media may earn a commission.See our ethics statement.

One of the biggest surprises of the Nintendo Switch 2’s reveal was its proposed accessibility. For years, Nintendo has been known foraccidentally stumbling on accessibility solutionswhile stubbornly refusing to engage with the broader subject. Yet, in the Switch 2, there appeared a more holistic approach to accessibility for which disabled players have been crying out. This was supported by a webpage dedicated tothe Switch 2’s hardware accessibility.

However, specifics were thin and no further information emerged ahead of the Switch 2’s debut. Now, having spent the last week with the Switch 2, I’ve found that this limited information hid, aside from a few missteps, an impressive suite of system-level accessibility considerations and advances that somewhat offsetthe otherwise gradual update the Switch 2 represents. But as we finally answer lingering accessibility questions over the Switch 2, there’s a nagging sense that this information should have been readily available ahead of launch.

I tend to find setup procedures dense and unapproachable thanks to cognitive disability. Yet I was pleasantly surprised at how breezy the Switch 2’s setup was. Aside from a few hiccups trying to decipherVirtual Game Cards(a feature I ended up opting out of), the whole process was intuitive and fast.

Accessibility features, however, are not available during setup. The console’s text-to-speech is not enabled by default, nor can you access text sizing and zoom options. This will represent a significant barrier to entry for some, and blind players may require sighted assistance during setup.

The increased size of the Joy-Con 2 feels better this time around, as does the Joy-Con 2 grip. But the controller size and the grip’s unergonomic square shape still don’t take long to incite my hand pain. Fortunately, Switch controllers and Joy-Cons are usable on the Switch 2, and the ability to default to the original Pro Controller is welcome.

It’s encouraging that you can pair other controllers with the Switch 2 using peripherals like the Magic-S Pro 2. Though, given recent trends in third-party peripheral support, I’d be reluctant to suggest that support is here to stay. We’re already seeing some connectivity issues around third-party controllers, especially 8BitDo gamepads, with8BitDo working on updates to get those working with the Switch 2.

Whatissupported, however, is Nintendo’s licensed adaptive controller:the Hori Flex. This works docked and in tabletop mode for games that don’t require mouse controls (some other features, like motion controls, may also cause issues). Keep in mind, you will need a USB-A to USB-C adapter to connect in tabletop mode.

Not everyone finds onscreen keyboards intuitive or accessible. The good news is you can connect a USB keyboard through the console’s USB-C ports and use that instead, including during setup.

We have no official number on the speed at which the Switch 2’s text-to-speech reads, but we can estimate. Using the information the system reads when you enable text-to-speech, we’ve found that both voice options averaged around 120–130 words per minute in US English. For UK English, it was 130–140 words per minute. Different languages will see different rates. There was some inconsistency in repeated tests that could not be accounted for simply by considering when timers were started and stopped.

That’s not the only quirk in the system. Players should be aware there is a noticeable delay between landing on a menu option and the text-to-speech kicking in. Similarly, during testing, toggling text-to-speech off led to a notification with the word “disabled.” Reenabling the function without moving out of the accessibility menu, however, did not lead to anything suggesting text-to-speech was back on.

All told, however, it’s a good system, controlled by a discrete speed slider that ranges from 50 percent to 300 percent. The slowest rate for US English users reads at around 60–70 words per minute and the max speed, where many blind players operate, is in the region of 400–420 words per minute.

When enabling text-to-speech, you’re told the function may not be supported on all screens. As things stand, it looks like text-to-speech works across all system-level menus, but not on the Nintendo eShop. Given this is the first place most players visit after setup, that’s an oversight that needs rectifyingsoon. Most games also don’t support system-level text-to-speech, includingMario Kart World.

Outside the ability to toggle mono audio — an important feature for hard-of-hearing players — greater audio customization is not available on the Switch 2 at a system level.

You may already know that GameChat’s speech-to-text will transcribe swear words. While this was reported widely as a bit of fun, it’s also an important accessibility feature that allows users — especially deaf players — to engagefullywith in-game communication without having to decipher improper transcription and censored text.

It’s not perfect. You may find speech-to-text swaps in odd words at times, but this is an error rather than censorship of specific terms.

Within the Switch 2’s settings, players can remap all inputs on connected controllers, and do so for each Joy-Con independently. You can also toggle the ability to access this menu at any time from the Switch 2’s quick menu, accessed by holding Home.

Unfortunately, current evidence suggests this option will not be present in Nintendo’s first-party games.Mario Kart Worlddoes not include any remapping options. Some might ask why this is a problem if system-level input rebinding exists, but in-game options for remapping are more instructive and convenient, and they limit rebindings to specific actions in-game rather than having to continuously rebind on a system level for every game. Being able to remap on the fly through the quick menu only mitigates this so much.

This is something Nintendo appears to understand, allowing remapping in the new GameCube games available to Switch Online subscribers.

It all adds up to an impressive suite of accessibility features and customization that will, hopefully, grow in time. The strange part is that Nintendo is being so quiet about it.The Vergereached out multiple times for clarification on the Switch 2’s accessibility and for more information relating to the questions above, but Nintendo didn’t respond.

One might expect that points to an internal awareness that features aren’t as robust as they should be. Outside a few missteps, however, this is a significant accessibility win and one would think Nintendo would want it out there. More importantly, and this is a lesson to anyone releasing a device or game: players need clear accessibility information ahead of release to make informed buying decisions and secure any help that might be needed.

Nintendo’s shift to greater accessibility is welcome. But in restricting the flow of information before release, the win is tempered somewhat by Nintendo’s willingness to keep its players in the dark.

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We’re also seeing steep discounts on 8BitDo’s Ultimate 2C controller and a wireless car adapter for Android Audio.

We’re also seeing steep discounts on 8BitDo’s Ultimate 2C controller and a wireless car adapter for Android Audio.

If you buy something from a Verge link, Vox Media may earn a commission.See our ethics statement.

Less than a month after making their debut, theWH-1000XM6are on sale at Amazon inblack,blue, andplatinumwith a $30 gift card for $448. It’s not a straight cash discount, sure, but if you were already debating picking up Sony’s latest pair of noise-canceling headphones, it makes the $50 price hike over thelast-gen XM5easier to stomach.

If you were to ignore the steep price hike, the new XM6 are a welcome improvement over the XM5 in every way. They’re outfitted with Sony’s latest noise-cancellation chip, which allows them to do a better job at drowning out the ambient noise you might encounter on the street, at your local coffee shop, or on your next cross-country flight. Their transparency mode is as natural-sounding as ever, too, and thanks to a new set of drivers, they deliver clearer vocals and the same dynamic, rich sound for which the XM series is known.

Design-wise, they also represent an excellent return to form, albeit with a few minor tweaks for added comfort and convenience. They sport a wider headband that’s designed to alleviate pressure during longer listening sessions, along with a redesigned power button that’s easier to distinguish from the onboard ANC button. More importantly, however, they once again collapse with the aid of a joint in each arm, allowing them to take up less room in the included carrying case. As someone who frequently travels with the XM5 — the only pair in the XM series thatcan’tfold down — I can say the change is greatly appreciated.

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“The most threatening sound to an oligarch is laughter.”

“The most threatening sound to an oligarch is laughter.”

As President Donald Trump kicked off a birthday military parade on the streets of Washington, DC, what’s estimated as roughly 2,000 events were held across the US and beyond — protesting Trump and Elon Musk’s evisceration of government services, an unprecedented crackdown by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and countless other actions from the administration in its first five months. Held under the title “No Kings” (with, as you’ll see, one conspicuous exception), they’re the latest in several mass protests, following April’sHands Off eventsand a wave ofTesla Takedown demonstrationsin March.

AsThe Verge’sTina Nguyen went to downtown DC, we also sent reporters to No Kings demonstrations spanning the country, plus a “No Tyrants” event in the UK. How would they unfold after promises of “very heavy force”against protestersin the capital, after the deployment of thousands of military troopsin a movea judge has bluntly called illegal, and afterpromises to “liberate”the city of Los Angeles from its “burdensome leadership” by local elected officials? What aboutthe overnight killingof a Minnesota Democratic state representative and her husband, and the shooting of a Democratic state senator and his wife?

The answer, at the events we attended, was fairly calmly — even against a backdrop of chaos.

An inflatable baby Donald Trump, dressed in a diaper, hovered over throngs of people rallying outside of Los Angeles City Hall. Demonstrators outnumbered clumps of California National Guard members in fatigues posted up along sidewalks.

“Go home to your families, we don’t need you in our streets,” one young person wearing a long braid down her back tells them while marching past. “Trump come catch these hands foo!” the back of her sign reads. I can’t see what the front says, but I can tell there’s an empty bag of Cheetos pasted to it.

The big baby joins the march, floating through the streets of Downtown LA over demonstrators. A flatbed truck rolls ahead of it, the band — maybe LA’s own Ozomatli? — singing “We don’t like Trump” to the tune of “We Want The Funk.”

Ducking inside Grand Central Market from the march, I talk to Puck and Twinkle Toes — two demonstrators in line for the public restrooms. Twinkle Toes tells me she’s part of an activist clown collective called Imp and Circumstance, wearing pink and white clown makeup and a striped pink and white bow wrapped around a loose hair bun atop her head. She’s here exercising her right to free speech, she says.

“The more people that are out here, the more we know that this is not okay. That we don’t want an autocrat. We want democracy,” Puck tells me, adding that the Pride March in Hollywood last weekend was “nothing but love and sunshine” despite protests andburning driverless carsmaking headlines in downtown. “The news tries to make you think all of LA is rioting. It’s not.” Puck says.

Back out on the streets, a young man quickly writes “Fuck ICE” on a black wall with white spray paint before a group of older demonstrators wearing floppy hats shushes him away — warning him that tagging will only attract more law enforcement.

Further along, another older man with tufts of white hair sticking out under his Lakers cap walks stiffly and slowly along under the summer sun. A Mexican flag draped across his shoulders, he crosses Hope Street. A young man wearing a Nike cap makes his way over to ask if he wants water; the old man accepts a bottle and keeps walking without stopping. The march has looped around downtown, and is coming to an end back at City Hall. As I make my way to my bus stop, a line of police vehicles — sirens blasting — whizzes past me, back toward the crowd still gathering around City Hall.

The Los Angeles Police Department issued adispersal orderfor parts of downtown Los Angeles later in the afternoon, citing people “throwing rocks, bricks, bottles and other objects.”Law enforcement reportedly cleared crowds using gas, and the LAPD authorized the use of “less lethal” force.

Four different “No Kings” protests in the greater Portland area on Saturday drew massive crowds of tens of thousands across the city. Various activists, government officials, and representatives for politicians spoke at the rallies, which also featured music and live performances. (One advertised free drag shows.)

Protesters of all ages came with dogs, strollers, flags, banners, and hand-made signs. At the downtown waterfront, some tourist boats appeared to still be departing, but the bike rental stand (which also sells ice cream) was closed for the day with a hand-lettered explanation reading “No crowns, no thrones, no kings” and “Americans against oligarchy.” Women appearing to be organizers passed out free American flags; many attendees came with their own American flags modified to fly upside down.

Most protesters brought signs expressing a wide range of sentiments on the theme of “No Kings.” Some signs were surprisingly verbose (“If the founders wanted a unitary executive (a king) we’d all still be British”) while others were more succinct (“Sic semper tyrannis”). Others opted for simple images, such as a picture of a crown crossed out, or — less frequently — a guillotine.

The waterfront park area was filled with people from the shoreline to the curb of the nearest street, where protesters held up signs to passing cars that honked in approval. The honking of a passing fire truck sent the crowd into an uproarious cheer.

Portland is about a thousand miles from the border with Mexico, but the flag of its distant neighbor nation has emerged as protest iconography in solidarity with Los Angeles. The rainbow pride flag was flown as often as the Mexican flag. Military veterans were scattered throughout the crowd, some identifying themselves as having seen action in conflicts spanning from Vietnam to Afghanistan. Emanuel, an Air Force veteran, told me that he had turned out in defense of the constitution and due process, saying, “Nobody has any rights if one person doesn’t have any rights.”

Anger was directed at ICE and the mass deportations all throughout the day, in signage, in chants, and in rally speeches.

The previous night, about 150 people protested at a local ICE facility — coincidentally located by the Tesla dealership — a mile south of downtown, near a highway exit. The ICE facility protests, which have been continuous for some days, have beensteadily building up. A couple of “No Kings” signs were present on Friday. (The following day, a handful of “Chinga la migra” signs would show up at the “No Kings” protests). Demonstrators stood on the curb urging passing cars to “Honk if you hate fascists,” successfully eliciting car horns every few seconds, including some from a pristine white Tesla.

Federal law enforcement in camo and helmets, their faces obscured, maced and shot at protesters with pepper balls, targeting them through the gates and sniping at them from the rooftop of the building. A handful of protesters — many wearing gas masks and respirators — formed phalanx formations in the driveway, wielding umbrellas and handmade shields.

On Saturday, a speaker at one of the “No Kings” rallies advertised the occupation of the ICE facility, saying, “We’re a sanctuary city.” The crowd — replete with American flags both upside down and right side up — cheered.

Nearly every intersection on Pasco County’s State Road 54 looks the same: a cross-section of strip malls, each anchored by a Walmart or Target or Publix, surrounded by a mix of restaurants, nail salons, and gas stations. It’s not an environment that is particularly conducive to protests, but hundreds of people turned out in humid, 90-plus degree weather anyway. The overall size of the crowd is hard to determine, but it’s larger than I — and other attendees — anticipated, given the local demographics. (Trump won 61 percent of the vote in Pasco County in 2024.)

Everyone is on the sidewalk; an organizer with a megaphone tells people to use crosswalks if they’re going to attempt to brave the six-lane highway. Two days earlier, Governor Ron DeSantissaidFloridians could legally run over protesters on the street if they feel “threatened.”

So far, most drivers seem friendly. There are lots of supportive honks. One woman rolls down her window and thanks the protesters. “I love you! I wish I could be with you, but I have to work today!” she yells as she drives away. Not everyone is amenable. A man in a MAGA hat marches through the crowd waving a “thin green line” flag and yelling “long live the king!” as people in the crowd call him a traitor. A pickup truck drives by blasting “Ice Ice Baby,” waving another pro-law enforcement flag.

The protesters have flags, too: American flags large and small, some upside down; Mexican; Ukrainian; Palestinian; Canadian; different configurations of pride and trans flags. Their signs, like their flags, illustrate their diverse reasons for attending: opposition to Trump’s “big beautiful” funding bill, DOGE’s budget cuts, and ICE arrests; support for immigrants, government workers, and Palestinians. One woman wears an inflatable chicken suit. Her friend pulls an effigy of Trump — dressed to look both like an eighteenth-century monarch, a taco, and a chicken — alongside her.

Most of the demonstrators are on the older side, but there are people of all ages in attendance. “I thought it was going to be maybe 20 people with a couple of signs,” Abby, 24, says, adding that she’s pleasantly surprised at both the turnout and the fact that most of the protesters are of retirement age. Abe, 20, tells me this is his first protest. Holding a sign that says “ICE = GESTAPO,” he tells me he came out to support a friend who is Mexican. Three teenagers walk by with signs expressing support for immigrants: “While Trump destroys America, we built it.” “Trump: 3 felonies. My parents: 0.”

As I drive away, I notice nine counter-protesters off to the side, around the corner from the main event. They wave their own flags, but the demonstrators seemingly pay them no mind.

Wearing a camo baseball cap — “Desert Storm Veteran” emblazoned on the front — Joe Arciaga greets a crowd of about 100 people in Los Angeles’ Historic Filipinotown around 9:00AM.

“Good morning everyone, are you ready for some beautiful trouble?” Arciaga says into the megaphone, an American flag bandana wrapped around his wrist. The faces of Filipino labor leadersPhilip Vera Cruz and Larry Itliong, who organized farm workers alongside Cesar Chavez,peer over his shoulders from a mural that lines the length of Unidad Park where Arciaga and a group called Lakas Collective helped organize this neighborhood No Kings rally.

“I’m a Desert Storm veteran, and I’m a father of three and a grandfather of three, and I want to work for a future where democracy is upheld, due process, civil rights, the preservation of the rule of law — That’s all I want. I’m not a billionaire, I’m just a regular Joe, right?”, he tellsThe Verge.

“I am mad as hell,” he says, when I ask him about the Army 250th anniversary parade Donald Trump has organized in Washington, DC coinciding with the president’s birthday. “The guy does not deserve to be honored, he’s a draft dodger, right?” Arciaga says. He’s “livid” that the President and DOGE have fired veterans working for federal agencies andslashed VA staff.

Arciaga organizes the crowd into two lines that file out of the park to stand along Beverly Blvd., one of the main drags through LA. Arciaga has deputized a handful of attendees with security or medical experience with whistles to serve as “marshals” tasked with flagging and de-escalating any potentially risky situation that might arise.

Johneric Concordia, one of the co-founders of the popularThe Park’s Finest barbecue jointin the neighborhood, is MCing out on Beverly Blvd. He and Arciaga direct people onto the sidewalks and off the asphalt as honking cars zip by. In between chants of “No hate! No fear! Immigrants are welcome here!” and rap songs from LA artist Bambu that Concordia plays from a speaker, Concordia hypes up the organizers. “Who’s cool? Joe’s cool?” He spits into the microphone connected to his speaker. “Who’s streets? Our streets!” the crowd cheers.

An hour later, a man sitting at a red light in a black Prius rolls down his window. “Go home!” he yells from the intersection. “Take your Mexican flag and go home!”

The crowd mostly ignores him. One attendee on the corner holds up his “No Kings” sign to the Prius without turning his head to look at him.

A few minutes later, a jogger in a blue t-shirt raises his fist as he passes the crowd. “Fuck yeah guys,” he says to cheers.

By 10AM, the neighborhood event is coming to a close. Demonstrators start to trickle away, some fanning out to other rallies planned across LA today. Concordia is heading out too, microphone and speaker still in hand, “If you’re headed to downtown, watch out for suspicious crew cuts!”

London’s protest was a little different than most: it was almost entirely bereft of “No Kings” signs, thanks to the fact that about two miles away much larger crowds were gathered to celebrate the official birthday of one King Charles III.

“We don’t have anything against King Charles,” Alyssa, a member of organizers Indivisible London, told me. And so, “out of respect for our host country as immigrants,” they instead set up shop in front of the US embassy with a tweaked message: “No kings, no crowns” became “no tyrants, no clowns.”

Of the hundreds gathered, not everyone got the memo, with a few painted signs decrying kings and crowns regardless, and one brave Brit brandishing a bit of cardboard with a simple message: “Our king is better than yours!”

Still, most of the crowd were on board, with red noses, clown suits, and Pennywise masks dotted throughout, plus costumes ranging from tacos to Roman emperors. “I think tyrants is the better word, and that’s why I dressed up as Caesar, because he was the original,” says Anna, a Long Island native who’s lived in London for three years. “Nobody likes a tyrant. Nobody. And they don’t do well, historically, but they destroy a lot.”

For 90 minutes or so the crowd — predominantly American, judging by the accents around me — leaned into the circus theme. Speakers shared the stage with performers, from a comic singalong of anti-Trump protest songs to a protracted pantomime in which a woman in a banana costume exhorted the crowd to pelt a Donald Trump impersonator with fresh peels.

During a break in festivities, Alyssa told the crowd, “The most threatening sound to an oligarch is laughter.”

The No Kings protest at Brooklyn’s Grand Army Plaza was a calmer affair. Instead of gathering under the picturesque memorial arch, protesters were largely sequestered to a corner right outside Prospect Park, with some streets blocked off by police. The weekly farmers market was in full swing, meaning people cradling bundles of rhubarb were swerving in and out of protest signs that read things like, “Hating Donald Trump isBrat” and “Is it time to get out the pitch forks?” Like during the Hands Off protest in April, New York got rain on Saturday.

The area where protesters were gathered made it difficult to count the crowd, but there were hundreds — perhaps a few thousand — people that streamed in and out. At one point, some protesters began marching down the street alongside Prospect Park, while others stayed at Grand Army Plaza to chant, cheer, and hold signs up at oncoming vehicles. With its proximity to the public library, the park, and densely populated neighborhoods, the massive intersection is a high-foot traffic area. Cars blared their horns as they passed, American flags waving in the chilly afternoon breeze.

Jane, a Brooklyn resident who stood on the curb opposite the protesters, said she isn’t typically someone who comes out to actions like this: before the No Kings event, she had only ever been to one protest, the Women’s March. (Jane asked thatThe Vergeuse her first name only.)

“I’m deeply concerned about our country,” Jane said, pausing as a long stream of trucks and cars honked continuously in support of the protesters in the background.

“I think Trump is behaving as an authoritarian. We’ve seen in Russia, in Hungary, in Hong Kong, that the slide from freedom to not freedom is very fast and very quick if people do not make their voices heard,” Jane said. “I’m concerned that that’s what’s happening in the United States.” Jane also cited cuts to Medicaid and funding for academic research as well as tariffs as being “unacceptable.”

The event was peaceful — there were lots of kids present — and people were in good spirits despite the rain. Protest signs ran the gamut from general anti-Trump slogans (“I trust light tampons more than this administration”) to New York City-specific causes like “Andrew Cuomo can’t read” (there isa contenious mayoral electionthis month).One sign read, “Fix your hearts or die,”an iconic linefrom the late director, David Lynch’s,Twin Peaks: The Return. And of course, amid nationwideimmigration raidsthat have been escalated by the involvement of the federal government, ICE was top of mind: one sign simply read, “Melt ICE,” and another protester held a large “NO ICE IN NYC” sign.

Though it was smaller and more contained than other events, the protest didn’t lack conviction: attendees of all ages stood in the cold rain, chanting and blowing into vuvuzela, banging the lids of pots and pans. At one point a man stood on the median on the street, leading the group in chants of “No justice, no peace.” Cars laid on the horn as they drove by.

It’s been raining pretty hard the last few days in Akron, OH, so much that I didn’t think there’d be a large turnout for our chapter of the No Kings protest. But I was emphatically proven wrong as the crowds I saw dwarfed the Tesla Takedown protests last month. Officially, the protest was to take place in front of the John F. Seiberling Federal Building on Main Street in Downtown Akron. But the concentration of people spilled over from that small space down Main Street and up Market Street. All told, though there were no official counts, I estimate somewhere between 500 to 900 people in this blue enclave in Northeast Ohio.

The mood was exuberant, buoyed by supporters who honked their horns as they passed. The chorus of horns was nonstop, and when a sanitation truck honked as it went by, cheers got louder. The chants the crowds were singing took on a local flare. Ohio is the home of the Ohio State Buckeyes and anywhere you go, shout “O-H” and you’ll invariably get an “I-O” response. The crowds used that convention to make their own chant, “OH-IO, Donald Trump has got to go.”

There was no police presence here and the crowd was very good at policing itself. Ostensibly out of concern for the incidents where people have rammed their cars into protestor crowds, the people here have taken up crossing guard duties, aiding folks who wish to cross Main or Market Streets. Toward the end of my time at the protest, I saw an older gentleman wearing Kent State gear and holding a sign that read, “Remember another time the National Guard was called in?” His sign featured a drawing of the famous photo from the event in which four Kent State students during a protest of the Vietnam War were killed by National Guard troops. I caught up with him to ask him some questions and he told me his name was Chuck Ayers, a professional cartoonist, and was present at the shooting.

“When I saw the National Guard in front of the federal building in LA,” he told me, “It was just another flashback.”

He did not tell me this at the time, but Ayers is a nationally recognized cartoonist, noted for co-creating the comic strip Crankshaft. He’s lived in Ohio his entire life and of course, drew that sign himself. As he was telling me about how seeing news of the National Guard being deployed in LA, I could see him strain to hold back his emotions. He said it still hurts to see this 55 years later, but that he was heartened to see so many people standing here in community and solidarity. He also said that given his pain and trauma he almost didn’t come. When I asked why he showed up when it so obviously causes him pain he said simply, “Because I have to.”

On a northward drive to Oneonta — population roughly 15,000, the largest city in New York’s mainly rural Otsego County — one of the most prominent landmarks is a sprawling barn splashed in huge, painted block letters with TRUMP 2024. (The final digits have been faithfully updated every election since 2016.) It’s Trump country, but not uniformly Trumpy country, as evidenced by what I estimated as a hundreds-strong crowd gathered in a field just below Main Street that came together with a friendly county-fair atmosphere. Kids sat on their parents’ shoulders; American flags fluttered next to signs with slogans likeSHADE NEVER MADE ANYONE LESS GAY,and attendees grumbled persistently about the event’s feeble sound system, set up on the bed of a pickup truck. It was the kind of conspicuously patriotic, far-from-urban protest that the Trump administration has all but insisted doesn’t exist.

Beyond a general condemnation of Trump, protest signs repped the same issues being denounced across the country. The wars in Gaza and Ukraine made an appearance, as did Elon Musk and Tesla. A couple of people called out funding cuts for organizations like NPR, one neatly lettered sign reminded us thatWEATHER FORECASTING SAVES LIVES, another warned “Keep your nasty little hands off Social Security,” and a lot — unsurprisingly, given thepast week’s events— attacked mass deportations and ICE. An attendee who identified himself as Bill, standing behind a placard that blocked most of him from sight, laid out his anger at the administration’s gutting of the Environmental Protection Agency. “I think if it was not for protests, there would be no change,” he told me.

The event itself, supported by a coalition including the local chapter of Indivisible, highlighted topics like reproductive justice and LGBTQ rights alongside issues for groups often stereotyped as Republican blocs — there was a speech about Department of Veterans Affairs cuts and a representative from the local Office for the Aging (whose words were mostly lost to the sound system’s whims). Rules for a march around the modest downtown were laid out: no blocking pedestrians or vehicles, and for the sake of families doing weekend shopping, watch the language. “Fuck!” one person yelled indistinctly from the audience. “No, no,” the event’s emcee chided gently. The philosophy, as she put it, was one of persuasion. “We want to build the resistance, not make people angry at us.”

But even in a place that will almost certainly never see a National Guard deployment or the ire of a Truth Social post, the Trump administration’s brutal deportation program had just hit close to home. Only hours before the protest commenced,ICE agents were recordedhandcuffing a man and removing him in an unmarked black car — detaining what was reportedly a legal resident seeking asylum from Venezuela. The mayor of Oneonta, Mark Drnek, relayed the news to the crowd. “ICE! We see you!” boomed Drnek from the truckbed. “We recognize you for what you are, and we understand, and we reject your vile purpose.”

The crowd cheered furiously. The stars and stripes waved.

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The uncanny festivities of the US Army’s 250th anniversary, celebrated on Donald Trump’s birthday.

Of all the jarring things I’ve witnessed on the National Mall, nothing will beat the image of the first thing I saw after I cleared security at the Army festival: a child, sitting at the controls of an M119A3 Howitzer, being instructed by a soldier on how to aim it, as his red-hatted parents took a photo with the Washington Monument in the background.

The primary stated reason for the Grand Military Parade is to celebrate the US Army’s 250th birthday. The second stated reason is to use the event for recruiting purposes. Like other military branches, the Army has struggled to meet its enlistment quotas for over the past decade. And according toverydefensive Army spokespeople trying to convince skeptics that the parade wasnotfor Donald Trump’s birthday, there hadalwaysbeen a festival planned on the National Mall that day, and it had been in the works for over two years, and the parade, tacked on just two months ago, was purely incidental. Assuming that their statement was true, I wasn’t quite sure if they had anticipated so many people in blatant MAGA swag in attendance — or how eager they were to bring their children and hand them assault rifles.

There had been kid-friendly events planned: an NFL Kids Zone with a photo op with the Washington Commanders’ mascot, a few face-painting booths, several rock-climbing walls. But they were dwarfed, literally, by dozens of war machines parked along the jogging paths: massive tanks, trucks with gun-mounted turrets, assault helicopters, many of them currently used in combat, all with helpful signs explaining the history of each vehicle, as well as the guns and ammo it could carry. And the families — wearing everything from J6 shirts to Vineyard Vines — were drawn more to the military vehicles, all-too-ready to place their kids in the cockpit of an AH-1F Cobra 998 helicopter as they pretended to aim the nose-mounted 3-barrelled Gatling Cannon. Parents told their children to smile as they poked their little heads out of the hatch of an M1135 Stryker armored vehicle; reminded them to be patient as they waited in line to sit inside an M109A7 self-propelled Howitzer with a 155MM rifled cannon.

But seeing a kid’s happiness of being inside a big thing that goesboomwas nothing compared to the grownups’ faces when they got the chance to hold genuine military assault rifles — especially the grownups who had made sure to wear Trump merch during the Army’s birthday party. (Some even handed the rifles to their children for their own photo ops.) It seemed that not even a free Army-branded Bluetooth speaker could compare to howfucking sickthe modded AR-15 was. Attendees were in raptures over the Boston Dynamics robot dog gun, the quadcopter drone gun, or really any of the other guns available (except for those historic guns, those were only maybe cool).

However many protesters made it out to DC, they were dwarfed by thousands of people winding down Constitution Avenue to enter the parade viewing grounds: lots of MAGA heads, lots of foreign tourists, all people who really just like to see big, big tanks. “Angry LOSERS!” they jeered at the protesters. (“Don’t worry about them,” said one cop, “they lost anyways.”) and after walking past them, crossing the bridge, winding through hundreds of yards of metal fencing, Funneling through security, crossing a choked pedestrian bridge over Constitution Ave, I was finally dumped onto the parade viewing section: slightly muggy and surprisingly navigable. But whatever sluggishness the crowd was feeling, it would immediately dissipate the moment a tank turned the corner — and the music started blasting.

Americans have a critical weakness for 70s and 80s rock, and this crowd seemed more than willing to look past the questionable origins of the parade so long as the soundtrack had a sick guitar solo. An M1 Abrams tank driving past you while Barracuda blasts on a tower of speakers? Badass. Black Hawk helicopters circling the Washington Monument and disappearing behind the African-American history museum, thrashing your head to “separate ways” by Journey?Fucking badass.ANOTHER M1 ABRAMS TANK?!?!! AND TO FORTUNATE SON??!?!? “They got me fucking hooked,” a young redheaded man said behind me as the crowd screamed for the waving drivers. (The tank was so badass that the irony of “Fortunate Son” didn’t matter.)

When you listen to the hardest fucking rock soundtrack long enough, and learn more about how fucking sick the Bradley Fighting Vehicles streaming by you are (either from the parade announcer or the tank enthusiast next to you), an animalistic hype takes over you — enough to drown outall the nationwide anger about the parade, the enormity of Trump’s power grab, the fact that two Minnesota Democratic lawmakers were shot in their homes just that morning, the riot police roving the streets of LA.

It helped that it didn’t rain. It helped that the only people at the parade were the diehards who didn’t care if they were rained out. And by the end of the parade, they didn’t even bother to stay for Trump’s speech, beelining back to the bridge at the first drop of rain.

The only thing that mattered to this crowd inside the security perimeter — more than the Army’s honor and history, andbarelymore than Trump himself — was firepower, strength, hard rock, and America’s unparalleled, world-class ability to kill.

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Plus, in this week’s Installer: A cool F1 trailer, the latest version of Android, a pretty new Fuji, and much more.

Plus, in this week’s Installer: A cool F1 trailer, the latest version of Android, a pretty new Fuji, and much more.

If you buy something from a Verge link, Vox Media may earn a commission.See our ethics statement.

Hi, friends! Welcome toInstallerNo. 87, your guide to the best andVerge-iest stuff in the world. (If you’re new here, welcome, happy It’s Officially Too Hot Now Week, and also you can read all the old editions at theInstallerhomepage.)

This week, I’ve been reading aboutSabrina CarpenterandKhaby Lameandintimacy coordinators, finally making a dent inBarbarians at the Gate,watching all theBen Schwartz and FriendsI can find on YouTube,planning my days with thenew Finalist beta, recklessly installing all theApple developer betasafter WWDC, thoroughly enjoyingDakota Johnson’s current press tour, and trying to clear all my inboxes before I go on parental leave. It’s… going.

I also have for you a much-awaited new browser, a surprise update to a great photo editor, a neat trailer for a meh-looking movie, a classic Steve Jobs speech, and much more. Slightly shorter issue this week, sorry; there’s just a lot going on, but I didn’t want to leave y’all hanging entirely. Oh, and:we’ll be off next week, for Juneteenth, vacation, and general summer chaos reasons. We’ll be back in full force after that, though! Let’s get into it.

(As always, the best part ofInstalleris your ideas and tips. What do you want to know more about? What awesome tricks do you know that everyone else should? What app should everyone be using? Tell me everything:installer@theverge.com. And if you know someone else who might enjoyInstaller, forward it to them and tell them tosubscribe here.)

Here’s what theInstallercommunity is into this week. I want to know what you’re into right now as well! Emailinstaller@theverge.comor message me on Signal — @davidpierce.11 — with your recommendations for anything and everything, and we’ll feature some of our favorites here every week. For even more great recommendations, check out the replies tothis post on Threadsandthis post on Bluesky.

“I had tried the paper planner in the leather Paper Republic journal but since have moved onto theRemarkable Paper Procolor e-ink device which takes everything you like about paper but makes it editable and color coded. Combine this with a Remarkable planner in PDF format off of Etsy and you are golden.” — Jason

“I started reading a manga series from content creator Cory Kenshin calledMonsters We Make. So far, I love it. Already preordered Vol. 2.” — Rob

“I recently went down the third party controller rabbit hole after my trusty adapted Xbox One controller finally kicked the bucket, and I wanted something I could use across my PC, phone, handheld, Switch, etc. I’ve been playing with theGameSir Cyclone 2for a few weeks, and it feels really deluxe. The thumbsticks are impossibly smooth and accurate thanks to its TMR joysticks. The face buttons took a second for my brain to adjust to; the short travel distance initially registered as mushy, but once I stopped trying to pound the buttons like I was at the arcade, I found the subtle mechanical click super satisfying.” — Sam

“The Apple TV Plus miniseriesLong Way Home. It’s Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman’s fourthLong Wayseries. This time they are touring some European countries on vintage bikes that they fixed, and it’s such a light-hearted show from two really down to earth humans. Connecting with other people in different cultures and seeing their journey is such a treat!” — Esmael

“Podcast recommendation:Devil and the Deep Blue Seaby Christianity Today. A deep dive into the Satanic Panic of the 80’s and 90’s.” — Drew

“Splatoon 3(the free Switch 2 update) and the newHow to Train Your Dragon.” — Aaron

“I can’t putMario Kart Worlddown. When I get tired of the intense Knockout Tour mode I go to Free Roam and try to knock out P-Switch challenges, some of which are really tough! I’m obsessed.” — Dave

“Fable, a cool app for finding books with virtual book clubs. It’s the closest to a more cozy online bookstore with more honest reviews. I just wish you could click on the author’s name to see their other books.” — Astrid

“This is the Summer Games Fest week (formerly E3, RIP) and there are a TON of game demos to try out on Steam. One that has caught my attention / play time the most isWildgate. It’s a team based spaceship shooter where ship crews battle and try to escape with a powerful artifact.” — Sean

“Battlefront 2is back for some reason. Still looks great.” — Ian

I have long been fascinated by weather forecasting. I recommend Andrew Blum’s book,The Weather Machine,to people all the time, as a way to understand both how we learned to predict the weather and why it’s a literally culture-changing thing to be able to do so. And if you want to make yourself so, so angry, there’s a whole chunk of Michael Lewis’s book,The Fifth Risk,about how a bunch of companies managed to basically privatize forecasts… based on government data. The weather is a huge business, an extremely powerful political force, and even more important to our way of life than we realize. And we’re really good at predicting the weather!

I’ve also been hearing for years that weather forecasting is a perfect use for AI. It’s all about vast quantities of historical data, tiny fluctuations in readings, and finding patterns that often don’t want to be found. So, ofcourse,as soon as I read my colleague Justine Calma’sstory abouta new Google project calledWeather Lab, I spent the next hour poking through the data to see how well DeepMind managed to predict and track recent storms. It’s deeply wonky stuff, but it’s cool to see Big Tech trying to figure out Mother Nature — and almost getting it right. Almost.

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Ryan Norbauer spent half a decade and several hundred thousand dollars reinventing the keyboard. It worked.

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 youdidn’thave 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 theSeneca, 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.

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’vespent 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 forhis 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.

Norbauergrew up in West Virginiain the 1990s, watchingStar Trek: The Next Generationand absorbing both its retro-modern aesthetic and its vision of an egalitarian, post-scarcity world. It was also the beginning of the personal computing era and the dawn of the internet. The computer represented an escape from the world as it is, a window into the future ofStar Trek, of Epcot, of the idea that a more connected world would be a better one.

The Seneca represents Norbauer’s attempt to make the best possible computer keyboard, to his own standards and tastes, without worrying about cost — the kind of keyboard that looks and feels like we remember keyboards feeling, back when we thought computers were a good idea.

“A big part for me of the allure of keyboards is the connection to my childhood nostalgia about being really excited about computing,” Norbauer tells me via video chat. So the Seneca is big, chunky, and has a standard tenkeyless layout, rather than something more compact or exotic, because that’s what he’s always used, and what brings back that feeling. “I feel like I can more authentically make an optimal keyboard if the first one I make is exactly the one that I want.”

Norbauer has a habit of wanting things that don’t exist, then figuring out how to build them from scratch. About 20 years ago, he got an idea for a dating website. “I didn’t have any money at all. I dropped out of a PhD program and I just had this idea for a company I wanted to start and I couldn’t hire anyone to code it for me. So I’m like, ‘Okay, I guess I just have to learn how to code.’”

He spent six months coding for 14 hours a day; this got him a website, a startup, and tendonitis. Fixing the tendonitis involved adopting proper typing form (wrists straight, hands hovering over the keyboard like a pianist’s). Searching for a more comfortable keyboard eventually sent him down the path of an obsession.

The dating website led to two more startups. Selling all three startups in 2010 gave him the time and money to explore new interests: at first, learning some industrial design skills so he could makeStar Trekprop replicas. It also led him to Topre keyboards.

Topre switches — most famously found in theHappy Hacking Keyboard— have arubber domeunder each key, instead of a physical switch. Pushing the key collapses the dome, which compresses a conical spring; a capacitive circuit under each key senses the change in capacitance and, at a certain threshold, registers a keypress. Releasing the switch snaps the dome back into place.

Topre keyboards are rare compared to mechanical keyboards using Cherry MX-style switches. Only a few companies ever made them, so there aren’t many layout options, and they tend to be more expensive, with fewer features for the money. They’re also harder to customize, with only a few different dome options; they also aren’t compatible with most aftermarket keycaps out of the box. And while metal cases are common in enthusiast mechanical keyboards, Topre keyboards only come in plastic. But Topre boards have a dedicated fan base because the domes give Topre switches a snappy tactility you can’t otherwise replicate.

By 2014, he was using a modifiedTopre Realforce 87ukeyboard in an aftermarket aluminum housing. He was also designing aStar Trek-inspired keycap set. Like most aftermarket keycaps, it worked with Cherry MX-style mechanical switches; Topre boards have a different keycap mount. So he couldn’t use hisStar Trekkeycaps on his favorite keyboard.

But then Cooler Master came out with theNovaTouch, which had Topre switches but worked with regular keycaps. Norbauer got one, but its cheap plastic housing didn’t feel right. He couldn’t find anyone to make him an aluminum housing for it. “So I just said, ‘Fuck it, I’ll figure it out myself.’”

He designed a housing and learned enough machining to make a prototype on a WWII-era milling machine. Once he was satisfied with the design, he found a manufacturer and launched asmall group buyon a keyboard forum and asked if any other Topre diehards wanted one, to cover the costs of making one for himself.

He figured it was a one-time thing. “It was never intended to be a business, but people just kept asking me to make more and more, and the thing kind of snowballed on its own.” He did a few more rounds of the case eventually dubbed the Norbatouch, in a few new colors, includinga beige to go with his now officially licensedStar Trekkeycaps. Then, because people kept asking, he started making housings for other Topre keyboards.

There was theNorbaforce, for Realforce tenkeyless keyboards, and theHeavy-6andHeavy-9, for the Leopold FC660C and FC980C, respectively. And in 2020, there was theHeavy Grail, his most popular housing, for the Happy Hacking Keyboard.

Each was a chance to refine his aesthetic and his manufacturing capability, and to experiment with different materials (steel, titanium, milled polycarbonate, copper) and finishes (polishing, bead-blasting, anodizing, powdercoating, cerakote, electroplating, even verdigris).

But they’re still only housings, not the keyboards themselves; to complete them, you still have to shuck a $200-plus keyboard from its plastic shell and stick it into the Norbauer housing. Making housings for other companies’ keyboards put him at the mercy of their supply chains and design decisions. The Novatouch was discontinued several monthsbeforehis first batch of casings was ready; supply of Leopold’s keyboards was unpredictable even before the company stopped making them.

He also wanted more control over the other aspects of the board, and he wanted something to offer people who like the Norbauer aesthetic but aren’t up for buying a keyboard, cracking it open, voiding the warranty, and transplanting the guts into a new case.

When I first emailed Norbauer in late 2018, he was already talking about building a ready-to-type keyboard — something people could pick up and enjoy right away. “I didn’t know exactly what that would look like, and I certainly didn’t know how hard it would be to get to that point. If I did, I probably never would have undertaken it.”

He made a prototype using off-the-shelf parts — standard MX-compatible switches and stabilizers — then scrapped it. There are already dozens of companies making custom keyboards.

Instead, he decided to create the thing he’s wanted all along: a keyboard with a heavy metal chassis and his own retrofuturistic aesthetic, with the snappy tactile feedback of a Topre-like capacitive dome switch and compatibility with the wide world of aftermarket keycaps.

“It was one of those things where my ambitions just kind of spiraled out of control.”

He hired an electrical engineering firm to design the PCB, which he figured would be the hardest part, since Topre switch clones are pretty easy to come by. That took about a year, on and off. “And then I realized, ‘Shit, I guess I have to make all the other stuff that goes with it.’ And that took about five years.”

Somewhere along the line, the project turned into a deliberate exercise in making the best keyboard he possibly can, regardless of cost. “It was one of those things where my ambitions just kind of spiraled out of control.”

For example: Topre switches feel great to type on, but they tend to be wobbly at the top — understandable for something sitting on top of a rubber dome — and keycaps often end up slightly crooked. He wanted a slightly deeper typing sound, and he wanted proper compatibility with MX-style keycaps. It’s not enough to swap the slider for one with the plus-sign -shaped MX stem, like other companies do; you also have to redesign the housings, or the keycaps just end up slamming into them.

He figured he could do better. His first prototypes sounded great, but they were just as wobbly as Topre. His second design had tighter tolerances, so it wobbled less, but it sounded worse. He added more material to get a deeper sound. Each revision required another (expensive) round of injection-molded tooling as he searched for the best combination of feel and sound.

By the fourth revision — the ones in the Seneca — the switches don’t look much like Topre. He redesigned the housings to avoid interference with MX-style keycaps, and added a third alignment leg to the sliders; they don’t rotate as easily in the housings, so the keycaps aren’t crooked. They have the high tactile bump and smooth downstroke of Topre switches, with a deeper sound. There’s a silicone ring for upstroke damping, and a gasket where they press against the underside of the brass switchplate.

While he was working on the switches, he tackledthe stabilizer problem. Stabilizers are the mechanisms that connect to long keys, like the space bar, shift, enter, and backspace, and make sure the whole key moves downward at the same rate regardless of where it’s pressed. They work, but they sound terrible, unless you find some way to stop the wire from rattling in the housing, the slider from slamming into the PCB, and the various plastic parts from rubbing together. Usually this involves some combination of lubes, greases, and physical damping. Tuning the stabilizers is the most time-consuming and tricky part of most keyboard builds.

“The original plan was to use hand-lubed MX stabilizers because it’s such a standard thing, right? But I thought it just would be interesting to see if there was some way to solve this problem without requiring it all to be based on lubrication to dissipate the sound.”

Norbauer wanted the Seneca to be the best keyboard in the world, so he had no choice. He had to make the best stabilizers in the world.

Developing the Seneca’s stabilizers took several years, a bunch of false starts, and, in his words, a “personal cash bazooka.” His first attempt, mostly on his own, resulted in what he considered a “90 percent solution” — better than anything on the market, without lube. But 90 percent there is 10 percentnotthere. He started over.

He worked witha firm that specializes in kinematicsto develop a totally new stabilizer mechanism. Actually, they came up withtwonew stabilizer mechanisms. The first is a compliant-beam design that’s significantly better than existing stabilizers as well as his first prototype. It’s much less prone to rattle or tick. It’s as close to perfect as you can get without totally rethinking how stabilizers work. The second design is a complicated series of pin-joint hinges with five times as many parts as a standard stabilizer. It’s hideously expensive to produce and both time consuming and fiddly to assemble, but it’s better.

The Seneca uses the second design.

This is illustrative of Norbauer’s general approach, which is that solving technical problems is much more interesting than trying to minimize production costs. On the Seneca, that’s taken to a deliberate extreme. “Our goal is just to make this good, and that’s all that matters. And so whenever there was a branch, I was like, ‘Let’s go with the rightest way to do it and damn the costs.’ And that has been the philosophy of this board.”

The Seneca’s case is milled from solid aluminum, with anMAO plasma-oxide finish; he had to set up a company in China in order to source it. There’s a warm gray option called travertine, which has a matte, slightly speckled stonelike look, and a lighter gray called oxide, which looks a bit like concrete. They’re both smooth to the touch. (There’s also a matte black version, which I haven’t seen in person, and a nearly $8,000 titanium option, which ditto.)

The switchplate is milled from solid brass, for the acoustic properties, and then chrome-plated for aesthetics. Aluminum would have been cheaper, lighter, and easier to mill, but brass absorbs sound better, so brass it is. The PCB contains a galvanic isolation chip to mitigate theincrediblyunlikely event that a rogue power supply sends a blast of electricity from the computer’s USB port into the keyboard. The cable has an obscenely expensive Lemo connector on the keyboard side. Lemo connectors are more secure than USB and Norbauer thinks they’re cool, and cool is better, and it’s his keyboard.

The keycaps are the least custom part of the board. Not that hewouldn’thave designed a new keycap profile for the Seneca, you understand. He looked into it, but in the meantime MTNU came out.MTNU’s spherical top surfaces and centered legends have exactly the aesthetic Norbauer was looking for, and it’s more comfortable to type on than other retro-looking keycap profiles like SA or MT3. All he had to do was pick the colors.

Each Seneca is assembled by hand in Norbauer’s garage in Los Angeles, at a rate of one or two per day, by either Norbauer or Taeha Kim — akaTaeha Types,keyboard influencer and bespoke keyboard builderturned Norbauer & Co. employee/investor.

The stabilizers alone take Taeha an hour or twoper keyboard, including a step where he takes a tiny reamer to each set to make the pin holes large enough for the (precision-ground) pins to fit in, these tolerances being tighter than can be managed with injection molding alone.

(I’m referring to Norbauer by his last name and Taeha by his first because that’s how they’re each known in the keyboard community.)

“Sometimes, if it’s not reamed quite enough, you’ll get a little bit of sluggishness in the fit between those parts. And the friction across the whole system is cumulative. So if you have a little bit of sluggishness in a few places, you don’t know until you’ve put the whole thing together that the stabilizer itself is a little bit sluggish,” says Norbauer. When that happens, they have to disassemble the keyboard, fix the stabilizer, and start over.

The cumulative effect of all those choices is a keyboard that has both incredibly high upfront costsandhigh per-unit costs. Actually, it sounds so expensive I ask Norbauer if he’s making money on the Seneca, even at $3,600 a pop.

The response is an immediate “Not yet! Oh God.”

“I mean, definitely when I sell this first batch, and probably the second batch, and well into the third or fourth, I would not have recouped my R&D costs on it. And it’s an interesting question. So, I’m bad at business.”

For most of the time he was making aftermarket housings, he says, the business wasn’t particularly profitable. “My goal has always been basically to break even while also doing really cool R&D stuff. I’m not personally losing a ton of money. But the Heavy Grail, for example, was a very popular offering. People really loved it and it sold way more than I ever thought it would. And that helped bootstrap and fund the Seneca, but 100 percent of what would have been profit went into that.”

Even as he was transitioning Norbauer & Co. from a company that sells housings to one that sells keyboards, he kept running into the fact that he does not like most aspects of running a business. This is not a huge problem when you’re selling a few dozen DIY housings at a time to Topre enthusiasts as a self-funding hobby. If you’re trying to build a business that sells fully custom luxury keyboards, it might become a problem.

Last year, when the Seneca was mostly developed and he was staring down a mountain of logistical tasks, he sold just under half the company to the investment firmTiny, run by an old acquaintance. The arrangement leaves Norbauer with a majority stake and total creative control — he’s still the CEO — and lets him focus on developing keyboards while other people take care of the “making money” part of it.

Other people, in this case, is Caleb Bernabe, Norbauer & Co.’s executive in residence. In a12,000-word blog post announcing the sale, Norbauer writes, “He acts essentially as our COO, but his job description is basically doing all the things that I hate — a skillset at which he inexplicably but admirably excels.”

The Seneca won’t make you a better writer — or a faster one, to my chagrin (ask me how many deadlines I blew writing this piece). I, personally, cannot justify spending $3,600 on a keyboard; I don’t know too many people who could. But after spending a couple months with the Seneca, I can see why someonewould.

This is a keyboard nerd’s luxury keyboard. That Norbauer spent half a decade and hundreds of thousands of dollars developing it is wild; that he actually pulled it off is even wilder. The switches and stabilizers alone are a tremendous achievement, and right now the Seneca is the only place they live.

Norbauer has spent a decade building credibility in the keyboard community and amassing a loyal (and well-heeled) fan base. He can make a $3,600 keyboard and be pretty sure that enough people will buy it that he can make it make sense.

Not that he wants to sell alotof keyboards. In fact,notselling a lot of keyboards is part of the plan. He sold 50 of them last summer, sight unseen, in a private preorder for a group of previous clients — paying beta testers, essentially. Right now he’s selling another 150 or so “First Edition” keyboards, to be delivered in late summer. Then he’ll probably do another batch. And another one after that. But he’s not going to sell a million.

“I think about my long-term vision for what we’re doing as being kind of like Leica, the camera company. They do crazy things that just wouldn’t exist otherwise, like theirmonochrome camera. I think it’s a very technically interesting thing. There’s obviously a tiny audience for it. And so in order to make it in any reasonable way, you have to charge a ton for it, because how many people on Earth are going to buy it? But I’m happier that that exists in the world.”

“In order to make it in any reasonable way, you have to charge a ton for it.”

As wild as it would be to reinvent the stabilizer and the switch just to make a few hundred seven-pound keyboards for rich coders, Norbauer plans to make other keyboards, now that he has the “full stack” of switches, stabilizers, and firmware and isn’t constrained by the handful of layouts available in Topre keyboards.

“The Seneca is meant to be this very dense sound-absorbing keyboard, a more deep thocky kind of thing that’s a permanent installation on your desk. And so the next thing is to go as far to the other end of the spectrum on those things as possible.”

It will probably be a 60-key HHKB-layout keyboard. It might have Bluetooth. And he’s thinking of doing it in either milled polycarbonate or forged carbon fiber, if he can pull that off. “The sound signature will be radically different. The weight will be radically different. And we’ll optimize for the opposite of everything we optimize for on the Seneca.”

There are so many more interesting problems for Norbauer to tackle. He’s having the firmware rewritten to make it open-source and add hardware remapping. There’s the next keyboard to design. New materials to experiment with. And there’s thatotherstabilizer design, the less complicated one — a few companies have approached him about getting it into production, but it needs a bit more R&D first.

Just don’t ask for a timeline. It’ll be done when it’s done.

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An elegant weapon, from a more civilized age.

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If you buy something from a Verge link, Vox Media may earn a commission.See our ethics statement.

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 onthe 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.

BeautifulIncredible typing feel & soundClassic layoutJust look at it

No firmware remappability yetProprietary cablePreposterously expensive

The Seneca is the first luxury keyboard fromNorbauer & 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 inthe other article we just published. The brief version is this: the Seneca is a custom keyboard, a descendant of theaftermarket 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 feelspermanent.It weighs nearly seven pounds and looks like smooth concrete or worn-down stone. The case is milled aluminum, with aplasma-ceramic oxidized finishthat 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 stabilizerswere 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 theHappy 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, mutedthock, without a hint of ping.

Thekeyboard’s info pagesays, “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,Vergeexecutive editor Jake Kastrenakes, who did not read the info page but did listen to the typing test embedded below,alsosaid it sounded like raindrops.

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

The Seneca isavailable 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 usingKarabiner-Elementson Mac and the PowerToys Keyboard Manager on Windows — is basically tolerable in the short term. But hardware remappingisimportant on compact keyboards, like the one the company plans to make next. Norbauer is working with Luca Sevá, akaCipulot—theguy 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 anegativethree-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 thana $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 sobecauseit’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 theClassic-TKLand theBauer Lite). You can get aRealforce keyboard for $250and 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.

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It automatically unlocks as I approach, looks great on my front door, and works locally with every smart home platform. But thanks to Matter, I have to pick between its two best features.

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It automatically unlocks as I approach, looks great on my front door, and works locally with every smart home platform. But thanks to Matter, I have to pick between its two best features.

If you buy something from a Verge link, Vox Media may earn a commission.See our ethics statement.

Legacy lock maker Kwikset has been producing innovativesmart lockssince 2013, when it released the first touch-to-open lock,the Kwikset Kevo.The company followed that up with the launch of one of thefirst key-free locksin 2016, one of the earliestApple HomeKit locks, and one of the firstfingerprint-only locks. Kwikset has not shied away from new tech.

Its latest model, theHalo Select($279.99), is one of the first full-replacement, Matter-over-Thread smart locks. I’ve tested almost every smart lock that Kwikset has made over the years, and this is its best yet. It’s super-responsive with solid features and broad smart home compatibility. It’s just too bad that using Matter means giving up its best feature.

Excellent auto-unlock functionChoice of Wi-Fi or Matter-over-ThreadGreat designDiscreet door sensorCan be rekeyed

Have to choose between Thread and Kwikset’s auto-unlockNo Home Key or biometric accessTouchscreen shows fingerprintsProminent Kwikset branding

The Halo Select is a sleek-looking lock that should fit in with both traditional and contemporary door sets, although it has a modern slant. As Kwikset is one of two major residential lock companies (the other being Schlage), you may already have Kwikset locks and handle sets on your outer doors, meaning the Select might fit in with what you already have — something few other smart locks do.

It offers four entry methods: a keyway (which isrekeyable), a touchscreen keypad, app / smart home control, and auto-unlock based on location. The latter worked so well that I didn’t mind the lack of a fingerprint reader or Apple Home Key — normally my two favorite access methods. (Kwikset hasteased a Halo Select Plus modelwith an NFC chip, but it hasn’t said whether that will work with Home Key or the forthcomingAliro standard.)

One of Halo Select’s standout features is the option to connect to your smart home via Matter-over-Thread. This brings broad smart home compatibility over a local protocol, working with Amazon Alexa, Google Home, Apple Home, and Samsung SmartThings, among others.

The Thread radio brings faster response times than Wi-Fi andsignificantly longer battery life— almost double based on my testing. There are only a handful of full-replacement, Matter-over-Thread locks available – includingthe Level Lock Plus, theEufy E30,U-tec’s Matter lock, and theYale Assure SL. But the Halo Select is your best option right now.

Kwikset’s auto-unlock feature worked flawlessly in testing

To set it up with Matter, you need aMatter controllerand a Thread border router. An Apple TV is both, or you can use a combination, such as an Echo speaker (Matter controller) and an Eero Wi-Fi router (Thread border router). Alternatively, you can connect the lock using its built-in Wi-Fi. This allows it to work with the Kwikset app, as well as Amazon Alexa and Google Home, via the cloud. You’ll lose the broader compatibility and battery life of Matter-over-Thread, but in exchange, you get one of the Halo Select’s best features: auto unlock.

Auto unlock is a relativelynew feature on Kwikset locks. It uses a combination of radios, includingGPS and Wi-Fi, to determine where your phone is in relation to your home so it can unlock the door as you approach.

This tech has been used in smart locks for a while — it wasfirst seen on the original August smart lockin 2013 — but each company implements it slightly differently. In most locks I’ve tested with the feature, it’s been unreliable, working only about half the time. However, on the Halo Select, the experience has been flawless, with the door unlocking just as I approach my porch, every time.

The Halo Select can also auto-lock based on location. Most smart locks, including the Select, can be set to lock after a set period of time. In practice, this sometimes means your door locks behind you when you pop out to grab something from the car. Kwikset’s location-based lock can be set to not lock until you’ve left the driveway.

The downside is that the Kwikset app has to be running in the background, so if my phone died while I was out, it wouldn’t work unless I remembered to open the Kwikset app after I powered it back on.

A new technology calledultra-wideband unlocking is coming (someday)to solve this problem. It will communicate directly between your phone and the lock, no app required, and could also work with devices like smart watches. In the meantime, Kwikset’s solution is the best I’ve tested.

The other main unlocking option is a touchscreen keypad. While touchscreen keypads can be finicky, the Select’s is super responsive, and I like the clicky feedback it gives. However, I’d like to see better fingerprint resistance, as you can see them at some angles, which could be a security concern.

The Kwikset app, which is simple and easy to use, lets you share up to 250 access codes and choose from temporary, scheduled, or permanent access. I like the new LED lock indicator, which lights up when the keypad does and shows green for unlocked and red for locked. (Yes, I have often found myself accidentally locking an already unlocked door.)

While I like the look of the new Halo Select, I don’t like the prominent Kwikset branding, and I wish the lock itself were smaller; the rear housing is still very big. But the mechanism is much quieter than previous Kwikset locks I’ve tested.

Installation and setup were straightforward, thanks to a detailed and easy-to-follow in-app guide. I was impressed with its super slim door sensor that tucks up above the strike plate. This sends an alert via the Kwikset app when the door has been left open and can show you in the app if the door is open or closed when you control it remotely. However, this only works with the Kwikset app. It’d be nice if it showed up as a sensor when the lock is connected in Matter.

The lock has to be set up in the Kwikset app and connected to Wi-Fi, but there is then the option to switch it over to Matter-over-Thread. The app does a good job of making it clear what will happen if you do this — you lose access to the lock in the Kwikset app and can no longer use the auto-unlock feature or access the door sensor to see if the door is open or closed. But it also tells you what you’ll gain. Matter-over-Thread does promise better battery life, plus the ability to add it to Apple Home, Samsung SmartThings, and other platforms.

I set it up in Apple Home, Google Home, and Samsung SmartThings via Matter with no issues and could control it with routines, automations, and voice commands. As for battery life, it uses four AA batteries that Kwikset says will last six months on Wi-Fi and over a year via Thread.

I tested it for five weeks on Wi-Fi and was at 50 percent, meaning I would get just over three months on Wi-Fi. After three weeks on Thread, it had only dropped 10 percent, an early indication that it should get the promised double battery life.

It’s frustrating to forgo features to use Matter, but this is mostlyan issue with Matter, not Kwikset. Matter doesn’t support auto-unlock, door sensing, fingerprint access, or newer entry methods like facial recognition. And while some ecosystems have geofencing automations that can be set to unlock your door, in my testing, they don’t work as well and sometimes require extra steps.

All of this means that, today, choosing a smart lock requires making some compromises.Kwikset’s solutionallows you to use some of those more advanced features today while retaining the future-proofing potential of Matter for tomorrow.

Every smart device now requires you to agree to a series of terms and conditions before you can use it — contracts that no one actually reads. It’s impossible for us to read and analyze every single one of these agreements. But we started counting exactly how many times you have to hit “agree” to use devices when we review them, since these are agreements most people don’t read and definitely can’t negotiate.

To set up the Halo Select, you must download and install the Kwikset app (iOS and Android) and create an account. By doing so, you need to agree to the following (Assa Abloy is Kwikset’s parent company):

The Select can be set up in Matter platforms such as Apple Home and Samsung SmartThings, but it must be set up in the Kwikset app first.

Final tally: three mandatory agreements.

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The RG Slide has an excellent screen, but it weighs almost as much as the original Nintendo Switch.

The RG Slide has an excellent screen, but it weighs almost as much as the original Nintendo Switch.

Anbernic hasn’t officially released or even put its newRG Slide handheldup for preorder yet, but a handful of reviewers have recently shared their first impressions of the new console. Anbernic may be leaning a bit too far into novelty and nostalgia with the RG Slide’s design, while not actually capitalizing on what made devices like the light and compact PSP Go andXperia Play smartphoneso fondly remembered.

The RG Slide will be priced at $189 and is expected to go on sale starting on June 20th, 2025,according toRetroDodo. It’s powered by an octa-core Unisoc Tiger T820 CPU, which is a processor Anbernic already uses in its higher-end handhelds like theRG Cubethat can emulate most games from the PS2 and Nintendo GameCube era. That’s paired with 8GB of RAM, 128GB of storage, a microSD card slot, and a 5,000mAh rechargeable battery that’s estimated to power the console for up to six hours between charges.

Retro Dodoliked theRG Slide’s 4.7-inch, 1280 x 960 pixel resolution screenand found it makes “retro consoles such as GameCube, Dreamcast, and PS2 look slightly more vivid in comparison to previous Anberic products.” It also found the console’s sliding mechanism to be satisfyingly solid, but lamented the loud “clack” it makes when opening or closing the device.

The console’s controls are as good as what’s found on other Anbernic devices and seem reasonably comfortable and well-balanced, but not quite as ergonomic as other handhelds.

BothRetro Dodoand Russ Crandall, who runsRetro Game Corps, feel that Anbernic missed the mark when it comes to the RG Slide’s size, which feels too large and thick to be comfortably pocketable. It also weighs 380 grams, which is just shy of the original Nintendo Switch that weighed 390 grams and much heavier than the 158-gram PSP Go.

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