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 you didn’t have 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 the Seneca, 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’ve spent 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 for his 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. 

Norbauer grew up in West Virginia in the 1990s, watching Star Trek: The Next Generation and 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 of Star 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 make Star Trek prop replicas. It also led him to Topre keyboards. 

By 2014, he was using a modified Topre Realforce 87u keyboard in an aftermarket aluminum housing. He was also designing a Star 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 his Star Trek keycaps on his favorite keyboard. 

But then Cooler Master came out with the NovaTouch, 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 a small group buy on 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, including a beige to go with his now officially licensed Star Trek keycaps. Then, because people kept asking, he started making housings for other Topre keyboards. 

There was the Norbaforce, for Realforce tenkeyless keyboards, and the Heavy-6 and Heavy-9, for the Leopold FC660C and FC980C, respectively. And in 2020, there was the Heavy Grail, his 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 months before his 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. 

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 tackled the 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 percent not there. He started over. 

He worked with a firm that specializes in kinematics to develop a totally new stabilizer mechanism. Actually, they came up with two new 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 an MAO 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 the incredibly unlikely 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 he wouldn’t have 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 — aka Taeha Types, keyboard influencer and bespoke keyboard builder turned Norbauer & Co. employee/investor. 

The stabilizers alone take Taeha an hour or two per 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 costs and high 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 firm Tiny, 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 a 12,000-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.”

Read my review of the Norbauer Seneca

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 someone would. 

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 a lot of keyboards. In fact, not selling 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 their monochrome 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.”

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 that other stabilizer 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.

Wireless charging is slower and less efficient than plugging in a wire, but it’s certainly convenient — especially when you add magnets. Most people who have an iPhone 12 or later (except the 16E) and want a magnetic charger should get a Qi2 charger. Any Qi2-certified charger will charge a MagSafe iPhone up to 15W — just as fast as MagSafe on any phone but the 25W-capable iPhone 16. Qi2 chargers are also less expensive than MagSafe-certified ones, and there are many more options. And unlike MagSafe, Qi2 is an open standard.

All of Samsung’s Galaxy S25-series phones — including the new S25 Edge — are “Qi2 Ready,” which means they don’t have the magnets, but they can charge up to 15W on a Qi2 charger when paired with a Qi2 Ready magnetic case. While it’s disappointing that Samsung didn’t include Qi2 in the phones themselves, most people use a case, so this feels like a small price to pay for access to the huge ecosystem of Qi2 accessories. If you use Android and like the sound of Qi2, we expect Google and others to release more Qi2-compatible phones later this year.

Qi2 adds some much-needed simplicity to the magnetic charging ecosystem. The options that once consisted of MagSafe-certified chargers (made or licensed by Apple, capable of 15W charging on iPhones) and “MagSafe-compatible” chargers (made by third parties, capable of 7.5W charging on iPhones) are now being replaced by Qi2.

Unless you can get a great deal or you have an iPhone 16, the only MagSafe-certified charger still worth considering is Apple’s improved puck. The 16-series iPhones can charge up to 25W on the new charger and the new charger only. The new charger is also Qi2-certified, so it’s worth considering for once. 

Featured in this article

Best for the iPhone 16 and 16 Pro: Apple MagSafe Charger (2m)

Apple’s updated MagSafe Charger is the only model that can currently supply up to 25W power to iPhone 16 series phones. It even works with non-Apple Qi2 devices.

Where to Buy:

• $49 $42.99 at Amazon
• $49 $42.99 at Best Buy
• $49.99 at Apple

Best Qi2 battery pack: Anker MagGo Power Bank (6.6K)

Anker’s MagGo power bank features 6,600mAh capacity and a built-in stand that, while bigger than it needs to be, is far sturdier than the kickstands on competing models.

Where to Buy:

• $69.99 at Amazon
• $69.99 at Newegg

There’s little reason to get a “MagSafe-compatible” charger unless you’re an Android user with a magnetic phone case on a phone that isn’t Qi2 Ready. The original Qi phones fall back to 5W charging on Qi2 but can charge up to 10W with a regular Qi charger, while Qi2 Ready phones can charge up to 15W when paired with the proper magnet case and charger.

Confused? Check out the table below that summarizes these charging speed nuances, and read on for our favorites of the Qi2 and MagSafe pucks, stands, 3-in-1 chargers, and battery packs we’ve tested so far.

Best for the iPhone 16 and 16 Pro

Apple MagSafe Charger (2m)

Score: 8

Pros	Cons
Capable of 25W charging on iPhone 16 models Comes in two cable lengths	Pricier than 15W rivals

Where to Buy:

• $49 $42.99 at Amazon
• $49 $42.99 at Best Buy
• $49 at Apple

Certification: MagSafe, Qi2 / Wireless charge output: 25W (iPhone 16), 15W (Qi2) / Cable length: 6.6ft / 2m / Connector type: USB-C / AC adapter included: no / Warranty: One year

While Qi2 is as fast as MagSafe on the iPhones 12 through 15, Apple has moved the goalposts with the iPhone 16 generation. The new phones can charge at up to 25W with the updated MagSafe Charger — making it the best choice for owners of the latest iPhone. It’s great to see faster wireless charging, but it does mean you’re again incentivized to buy Apple’s puck over cheaper, more widely available Qi2 options.

For once, there’s good reason to consider the Apple puck. It’s Qi2-certified as well as MagSafe, so it’ll work with non-Apple Qi2 devices, should those materialize. And the company has finally added a version with a 2m / 6.6ft cable instead of only offering a too-short 1m / 3.3ft one. Get the longer one. You’ll also need an AC adapter since it doesn’t come with one. Both Anker and Nomad, among others, have options that are smaller and cheaper than Apple’s USB-C chargers. Nomad’s, in particular, has a nice, flat design.

— Antonio G. Di Benedetto

Best Qi2 charging puck overall

Anker MagGo Qi2 Certified 15W Wireless Charger

Score: 8

Pros	Cons
Relatively inexpensive Available in black or white	The 5-foot cable is fine, but lengthier is better

Where to Buy:

• $24.99 $22.99 at Amazon (without adapter)
• $35.99 $25.99 at Amazon (with adapter)
• $39.99 at Anker (two-pack, without adapter)

Certification: Qi2 / Wireless charge output: 15W / Cable length: 5ft / 1.5m / Connector type: USB-C / AC adapter included: Yes, optional / Warranty: Two years

Any Qi2-certified charger will charge any MagSafe iPhone at 15W (except for the iPhone 12 Mini and 13 Mini, which top out at 12W). If you just want a basic puck, we like Anker’s MagGo Qi2 wireless charging pad. Its five-foot cable is shorter than the 6.6-foot one on Apple’s new MagSafe charger, but it’s also $20 cheaper. When you consider that Anker includes an AC adapter and Apple doesn’t, it’s more like $40 cheaper. Unless you have an iPhone 16 and really want that 25W charging, the Anker Qi2 puck is a better value.

— Antonio G. Di Benedetto

Best Qi2 3-in-1 charger for travel

Satechi 3-in-1 Foldable Qi2 Wireless Charging Stand

Score: 8

Pros	Cons
Folds flat and opens into a sturdy stand for charging three devices Includes a 45W power adapter Fast-charges compatible Apple Watch models	A little pricey

Where to Buy:

• $129.99 at Amazon
• $129.99 at Best Buy
• $129.99 at Satechi

Certification: Qi2 / Wireless charge output: 15W / Apple Watch fast charging: Yes / Cable length: 5ft / 1.5m / Connector type: USB-C / AC adapter included: Yes / Warranty: One year

The Satechi 3-in-1 Foldable Qi2 Wireless Charging Stand makes a great travel charger for people who hit the road with an iPhone, Apple Watch, and AirPods. It folds up flat and compact enough to easily slip into a bag or carry-on pocket, and it includes a 45W power plug with prong adapters that cover most of the globe. Its aluminum and faux-leather construction is also substantial enough, and its design elevated enough, to be the main 3-in-1 charger on your desk once you’re back home. (There’s also a 2-in-1 version without the Apple Watch charger, which is similarly nice but doesn’t come with an AC adapter.)

Honorable mention:

Anker MagGo Wireless Charging Station (Foldable 3-in-1)

Score: 7

Pros	Cons
Charges up to three devices and folds into a compact bar Fine for bedside use while traveling	Small footprint makes using it with multiple devices challenging

Where to Buy:

• $109.99 $82.49 at Amazon (with code 0URGAGTK)
• $109.99 $82.99 at Anker (with code WSPDV2A4JI1Y)

Certification: Qi2 / Wireless charge output: 15W / Apple Watch fast charging: Yes / Cable length: 5ft / 1.5m / Connector type: USB-C / AC adapter included: Yes / Warranty: Two years

Anker’s folding 3-in-1 is smaller and more compact than the Satechi — it’s more like a bar of soap than a bar of chocolate — but it doesn’t include prong adapters. Also, its lighter build makes it easy to accidentally pick up the whole charger when you just meant to grab your phone and gives it more limited articulation for home desktop use. It’s best suited for frequent travelers who don’t want to pack up their home charger before every trip.

— Antonio G. Di Benedetto

Best Qi2 3-in-1 stand for home

Belkin BoostCharge Pro 3-in-1 Magnetic Wireless Charging Stand with Qi2 15W

Score: 9

Pros	Cons
Nice design that elevates your devices on a desk space Comes with a 36W USB-C power adapter Fast-charges compatible Apple Watch models	Expensive

Where to Buy:

• $129.99 $74.99 at Amazon
• $129.99 at Belkin
• $129.95 at Apple

Certification: Qi2 / Wireless charge output: 15W / Apple Watch fast charging: Yes / Cable length: about 5ft / 1.5m (permanently attached) / Connector type: USB-C / AC adapter included: Yes / Warranty: Two years

Once again, the Belkin “tree” towers over all others when it comes to a 3-in-1 for home use. The latest version fixes some of our minor grievances from its predecessors while adopting the Qi2 standard. It now uses an included 36W USB-C power adapter instead of a gigantic plug with a barrel connector, and the elevated Qi2 mount can tilt your phone in a variety of angles. Its nylon-wrapped USB-C cable isn’t detachable, but at least it’s about five feet long.

— Antonio G. Di Benedetto

Best Qi2 desk charger

Anker MagGo Magnetic Charging Station 8-in-1

Score: 8

Pros	Cons
Ponderous orb that can charge a bunch of devices Built-in Qi2 pad on its front Packs four USB ports and three AC outlets on its back	Can become a cthulhu monster of messy wires

Where to Buy:

• $69.99 $59.99 at Amazon
• $69.99 $59.99 at Walmart
• $69.99 at Anker

Certification: Qi2 / Wireless charge output: 15W / Cable length: about 5ft / 1.5m / Connector type: 12V AC / AC adapter included: Attached / Warranty: Two years

Staff opinions on this orb are, frankly, divided, but I had it on my desk for a while, and after I sent it back, I missed it enough that I bought one. This Death Star-looking thing has a Qi2 pad on the front and two USB-C ports, two USB-A ports, and three AC outlets on the back, with up to 67W charging between them. Fully utilized, yeah, it’s gonna look like a cable octopus, but it’s nice to have something in arm’s reach that can charge your phone, your laptop, and whatever else you’ve got going on.

— Nathan Edwards

Best Qi2 battery pack

Anker MagGo Power Bank (6.6K)

Score: 8

Pros	Cons
6,600mAh of power is adequate for most use cases Sturdy kickstand	Other kickstand-less options are smaller or pack more power

Where to Buy:

• $69.99 at Amazon
• $69.99 at Newegg

Certification: Qi2 / Wireless charge output: up to 15W / Cell capacity: 25.41Wh (6,600mAh) / Connector type: USB-C / Warranty: Two years

This folding Qi2 battery pack doubles as a phone stand and has 6,600mAh capacity, which is more than enough to fully charge even an iPhone 16 Pro Max. You can also charge from its USB-C port if you prefer. It’s not the slimmest Qi2 battery, but it’s sturdy enough to hold the phone in landscape mode without toppling, which is nice.

— Nathan Edwards

Read our hands-on with the Anker MagGo Power Bank (6.6K).

Best Qi2 car mount

ESR Qi2 Magnetic Wireless Car Charger

Score: 8

Pros	Cons
Inexpensive Easy and flexible mounts Fast 15W charge Compatible with MagSafe cases	Fat clip won’t fit some vents No power adapter in box Magnet not strong enough for extreme use

Where to Buy:

• $39.99 $18.99 at Amazon
• $39.99 $29.99 at ESR

Certification: Qi2 / Wireless charge output: 15W / Cable length: 3.3ft / 1m / Connector type: USB-C / AC adapter included: No / Warranty: One year

The Verge’s Thomas Ricker and I both like this compact Qi2 car charger. It can be either vent- or dash-mounted, and it’s inexpensive, though you’ll have to supply your own USB-C power adapter. I bought the “CryoBoost” version, which has a cooling fan, since I live in sweltering Texas. And since my car is ancient and my old Bluetooth FM transmitter’s USB port couldn’t power the Qi2 pad, I also got this 60W FM transmitter / USB-C charger thing. It plugs into the 12V (the “cigarette lighter”) port and has an integrated coiled 30W USB-C cable, which I use for the ESR Qi2 charger, plus another 30W USB-C PD port, a USB-A port, and the aforementioned Bluetooth FM transmitter. Honestly, a killer deal.

There are a ton of Qi2 car mounts out there, and we have a few more in the queue, but this one’s good!

— Nathan Edwards

Read our full review of the ESR Qi2 Magnetic Wireless Car Charger.

Other chargers worth considering

Now that Qi2 is widely available, it’s a safe bet that you’re at least getting something decent if it’s Qi2-certified and it’s from a reputable brand. While our best-ofs above don’t cover every single make and model of charger out there, we’re frequently testing units from the likes of Anker, Belkin, Casetify, Mophie, Nomad, Satechi, Ugreen, Peak Design, Zens, Sharge, and ESR. If there’s a Qi2 charger from one of them that seems like a good fit for your particular needs and your budget, it’s likely worth a shot. When in doubt, know the retailer’s return policy and the manufacturer’s warranty if it ends up not being to your liking.

Update, May 21st: Adjusted pricing / availability for several options and noted that the new Samsung Galaxy S25 Edge also supports Qi2 charging when paired with the proper case.

The Department of Government Efficiency has requested access to the Internal Revenue Service’s taxpayer data system — potentially giving it access to highly sensitive information, including Social Security Numbers and tax returns — according to a report from CNN. DOGE has also launched an IRS-specific account on X and is soliciting “insights on finding and fixing waste, fraud, and abuse” within the agency.

The New York Times reports that DOGE is seeking, and will likely get, access to systems including the Integrated Data Retrieval System (IDRS), which contains personally identifying information on millions of taxpayers, including bank account numbers, Social Security numbers, addresses, tax returns, and more. Access to the IDRS is highly restricted within the IRS, and improper access can be punished by fines and imprisonment.

“Waste, fraud and abuse have been deeply entrenched in our broken system for far too long,” Harrison Fields, White House deputy press secretary, said in a statement to multiple outlets. “It takes direct access to the system to identify and fix it.”

Senators Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Ron Wyden (D-OR) sent a letter to the IRS commissioner on Monday requesting that the IRS “immediately disclose to the Senate Committee on Finance the full extent of the potential access to IRS systems and data granted to DOGE team members so that the Committee can address any efforts by DOGE personnel to gain access to taxpayer records at the IRS, which may constitute criminal violations of federal privacy laws.”

The Times also reports that the IRS is planning to lay off thousands of employees in the lead-up to the service’s busiest time of year. Tax Day in the US this year is April 15th.

The M4 iMac is a beautiful computer that feels more and more like it fell out of a universe where laptops never took off. 

You can see it, can’t you? In a world without laptops, the iMac would be the ultimate computer. Instead of a box and a screen with a tangle of wires leading everywhere, everything you need is right there, jammed into an impossibly thin aluminum chassis. Monitor, processor, speakers, webcam, microphones, and all the ports: all built in. It’s elegant. It’s restrained. It’s lovely. It’s plenty fast enough for most people. The iMac would be in every library, in dorm rooms, in cubicles, in computer labs and living rooms. People would haul them to coffee shops. 

Now imagine going to that universe and showing them a MacBook Pro. People might go for that instead. 

Apple iMac (M4)

Score: 6

Pros	Cons
Still beautiful 16GB of RAM in the base model Great webcam, speakers, and mic Display is pleasant to look at	Still using the same 24-inch screen from 2021 Base model still underequipped Can’t be used as a monitor for another computer The entire concept is increasingly archaic and niche

Where to Buy:

• $1149 at Amazon
• $1199 at Best Buy
• $1299 at Apple

The M4 iMac is a beautiful object and a good computer. The design is three years old, but it’s still stunning, especially from the back. It’s still the only Mac that comes in actual colors, and this year they’re even cheerier. It’s a little faster than last year, there’s more RAM in the base model, and it gets the same new webcam and anti-glare screen option as the M4 MacBook Pro.

But otherwise, it’s the same machine as it was in 2023, and it’s substantially the same as it was back in 2021. Don’t get me wrong, I love looking at this thing. I feel calmer and more productive walking into my office and seeing that unbroken expanse of blue instead of the rat’s nest of cables that come out of my regular monitor. There are just vanishingly few situations in which the most important thing about a computer is how it looks from the back, and the iMac asks you to give up too much in exchange.

The M4 iMac starts at $1,299 with an 8-core CPU, 8-core GPU M4 chip, 16GB of memory, and a 256 GB SSD. As usual, the starting configuration seems to exist only to encourage you to spend more money. Only two of the base models’ four USB-C ports are Thunderbolt ports, it only supports one external display instead of two, the Ethernet port costs extra, and the Magic Keyboard it comes with doesn’t have TouchID. All those problems disappear if you spend $200 more to get the next tier, which also bumps you up to a 10-core CPU. If you’re buying an iMac for yourself, that $1,499 model is the real starting point. 

My review unit, with a 10-core CPU and GPU, 24GB of RAM, a 1TB SSD, the $200 anti-glare nanotexture coating, and the full-sized Magic Keyboard comes out to $2,329. This is more than you should spend on an iMac.  

The thing about an all-in-one computer is that all of those things have to be worth it. If you have to start plugging in a bunch of stuff to compensate for what’s built in, you might as well get something else. (This is what’s known in the biz as “foreshadowing.”) And the iMac mostly, mostly nails it. 

That 10-core processor is the same chip as the base M4 Mac Mini or MacBook Pro, and in daily use, the iMac feels plenty fast. Even the 8-core base model should be good for at least five years and probably longer, thanks to that 16GB starting RAM. My work machine is a four-year-old M1 MacBook Air with 16GB of RAM, and I have no complaints about its speed in day-to-day work. (Port selection and the fact that I can only use one external monitor, yes.) Apple Silicon has some legs to it. You do have to hand it to them.

The iMac’s speakers are as good as ever, and the mics and noise-canceling are advanced enough that I never had to plug in a headset for a video call. The 12MP Center Stage camera is a big upgrade over last year’s model and much less obnoxious than the similar ultrawide one in the Surface Pro 11, which defaults to a zoomed-way-out view of your entire surroundings. It’s better at keeping me centered in the screen than the gimbal-mounted Insta360 Link webcam I usually use. And unlike the Insta360, it doesn’t randomly decide to point at my lap or bookshelf instead of my face or refuse to turn on because it’s not getting quite enough power from the USB hub behind my monitor.

The iMac comes with a color-matched Magic Keyboard and either the Magic Mouse or the Magic Trackpad. Many people like the Magic Keyboard, and I’m happy for them. If I’m at a desk anyway, I’m going to use a keyboard with better key travel and ergonomics instead of something that feels like tapping on a pizza box. 

But even when I’m using a different keyboard, I have to keep the Magic Keyboard within arm’s reach so I can use TouchID. TouchID is great, and it’s frustrating that Apple put it on the keyboard instead of the power button, and it’s doubly frustrating that you have to upgrade from the base model to get it.

The Magic Trackpad is great, though. No complaints. 

I do not love that there are only four ports (not counting the headphone jack) and that they’re all USB-C. It does look pretty, until you have to transfer images from an SD card or plug in a USB-A adapter, and then you’re in dongletown again. I have lived in dongletown for a long time now, but I don’t love it any more than I did in 2015. 

I also do not love that the stand has no height adjustment, and you can’t swap it for a more ergonomic option without buying an entirely different computer. Apple sells a version of the iMac with a VESA mount, but it doesn’t come with a stand at all, and most height-adjustable VESA mounts are not as pretty as the iMac. The Studio Display has a height-adjustable stand option, so we know Apple can make one it’s willing to put out into the world. It just hasn’t done so here. But whatever. I have hardcover books. It’s fine.

And now we come to the display, which is the reason you’d buy the iMac and the reason most people shouldn’t. The 23.5-inch, 4480 × 2520 LED-backlit panel is lovely, as far as it goes. It has a wide color gamut, the optional nanotexture finish is great at glare prevention in bright rooms, and True Tone rules. I love the way the screen brightness and color temperature change in response to the light in the room. This is a feature I now take for granted on my phone. My regular monitor doesn’t do it, and it’s nice that the iMac does. 

(Side note on the nano-texture screen: it’s great at cutting glare from the window during daylight hours, which lets me keep the blinds open so I feel less like I’m living in a cave. But my spouse, who also works at a computer all day, saw it in the evening and said it was grainy and made her eyes hurt.) 

It’s just that the screen is a little small. I’m used to working on a 27-inch or 32-inch 4K monitor, with several apps open next to each other. Although the iMac has a higher resolution, the physical size of the screen means I can’t fit as much on it without scaling everything down to the point where I go looking for a pair of reading glasses. It’s also stuck at 60Hz and only gets up to 500 nits of brightness, with no HDR support.

Even that isn’t the problem with the iMac. The problem is that the display only works with one computer, is inextricable from that computer, and that computer starts at $1,299. If you want a bigger screen or a faster screen or an OLED screen or HDR or a screen you can use with any other computer or you want a more powerful computer or a more portable computer or a cheaper computer, then the iMac just isn’t for you. 

Chances are, the display is going to feel cramped and dated long before the rest of the computer does. Or the opposite: you’ll have a display you’re still happy with that can only be used with a computer you aren’t. And since we live in a world that contains the excellent Mac Mini and the MacBook Pro, as well as a robust selection of monitors that aren’t locked to one computer forever, the only real reason to get an iMac is for the vibes.

If you want an Apple desktop, you can get a Mac Mini with the same specs as an iMac and have $900 left over for a monitor, webcam, speakers, keyboard, and mouse, even if you somehow don’t have any of those things already. 

If you want flexibility, you can get a MacBook Pro with the same specs as an iMac and have a machine with all-day battery life; a great display, speakers, mic, webcam, keyboard, and trackpad; and more ports — and still have enough money left over to buy a monitor to plug it into.

Granted, it will be uglier from the back, but who’s looking at the back? 

Back in the iMac’s heyday — the late ’90s and early 2000s — laptops weighed five pounds or more and lasted a couple of hours on a charge. Smartphones weren’t a thing. Tablets weren’t a thing. Most families that had a computer at home had one shared desktop — two, if you were lucky. That’s where the iMac came from. But that’s not where we are. 

In this universe, in late 2024, we are spoiled for computers. My kids use either an iPad or a school-issued Chromebook. My spouse has a work laptop and a tablet. And I have a 32-inch monitor with a bunch of peripherals plugged into it, which I use to swap between my Windows desktop and any of several laptops, including my M1 Air. And of course, we both have our phones. Even if I were to set up a family computer — which I’ve considered! — I can’t see a situation in which I’d opt for an all-in-one instead of buying a monitor and computer separately. 

The problem with the iMac is that it’s just not built for this world. Most people should get something else, and most people do. It really only makes sense if you’re buying a computer for a reception desk or lobby area or somewhere you want to project a calm, sophisticated, uncluttered aesthetic. In that case, the cheapest model is going to be fine. Hope you don’t need to plug in too many things, or you’ll wreck the vibe.

For the rest of us, it makes a lot more sense to buy a Mac Mini or a laptop and a separate monitor. And tidy your desk every once in a while. 

Photography by Nathan Edwards / The Verge

Corrections, November 23rd: The comparison chart in an earlier version of this article misstated the price of two configurations of the iMac without the nanotexture screen. The 10C / 10C / 16GB / 512GB option is $1,699, not $1,899; the 10C / 10C / 24GB / 512GB is $1,899, not $2,099. The “specs as tested” section below also misstated the core counts, display type, and RAM type.

A security researcher revealed a “catastrophic” vulnerability in the Arc browser that would have allowed attackers to insert arbitrary code into other users’ browser sessions with little more than an easily findable user ID. The vulnerability was patched on August 26th and disclosed today in a blog post by security researcher xyz3va, as well as a statement from The Browser Company. The company says that its logs indicate no users were affected by the flaw.

The exploit, CVE-2024-45489, relied on a misconfiguration in The Browser Company’s implementation of Firebase, a “database-as-a-backend service,” for storage of user info, including Arc Boosts, a feature that lets users customize the appearance of websites they visit.

In its statement, The Browser Company writes:

Arc has a feature called Boosts that allows you to customize any website with custom CSS and Javascript. Since running arbitrary Javascript on websites has potential security concerns, we opted not to make Boosts with custom Javascript shareable across members, but we still synced them to our server so that your own Boosts are available across devices.

We use Firebase as the backend for certain Arc features (more on this below), and use it to persist Boosts for both sharing and syncing across devices. Unfortunately our Firebase ACLs (Access Control Lists, the way Firebase secures endpoints) were misconfigured, which allowed users Firebase requests to change the creatorID of a Boost after it had been created. This allowed any Boost to be assigned to any user (provided you had their userID), and thus activate it for them, leading to custom CSS or JS running on the website the boost was active on.

Or, in the words of xyz3va,

arc boosts can contain arbitrary javascript

arc boosts are stored in firestore

the arc browser gets which boosts to use via the creatorID field

we can arbitrarily change the creatorID field to any user id

You can get someone’s creatorID in several ways, including referral links, shared easels, and publicly shared Boosts. With that info, an attacker could have created a boost with arbitrary code in it and added it to the victim’s Arc account without any action on the victim’s part. That’s bad.

The Browser Company responded quickly — xyz3va reported the bug to cofounder Hursh Agrawal, demonstrated it within minutes, and was added to the company Slack within half an hour. The bug was patched the next day, and the company’s statement details a list of security improvements it says it’s implementing, including setting up a bug bounty program, moving off of Firebase, disabling custom Javascript on synced Boosts, and hiring additional security staff.