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Comment by svnt

3 years ago

You won’t need a keyboard.

You do. I’m 100% sure that flickering your fingers in the air simple (besides looking like an absolute moron) doesn’t have enough information to accurately type. Also, your arms will fatigue immediately.

  • If you can position things in AR, you can put keyboard keys down on wood grain and the device can tell where your fingers land.

    If you can escape the skeuomorphic trap, many things are possible. A mechanical keyboard is certainly not the universally optimal means of character entry.

    Maybe not in this rev, probably not at launch based on the video, but keyboards as we know them are due for an overhaul.

    • > A mechanical keyboard is certainly not the universally optimal means of character entry.

      Funnily enough, I think that this is basically the ultimate limit of touch based systems — humans rely very much on touch, and touch screens’ smooth surface removes every physical hint from the system. Just remember back to how we could compose a whole message blindly in our pockets with feature phones, yet I can’t write a sentence correctly nowadays without constantly looking at the screen.

      Now you would even take away that? Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think that the keyboard layout or anything is the optimum, but it is sure as hell closer to it than randomly hitting the table. The mechanical part is funnily being the key part.

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    • > If you can position things in AR, you can put keyboard keys down on wood grain and the device can tell where your fingers land.

      You'll get carpal tunnel syndrome faster than the battery drains if you're actually doing that. One of the main points of keyboards is actually the fact that they absorb some of the shock of typing.

      It's actually extremely plausible that the keyboard is the best possible text input method - at least until we find a way to read brain signals non-invasively and decode those into text directly.

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Eventually, maybe. In the keynote, there was a vague outline of a virtual keyboard, but (unless I missed it) we never saw that virtual keyboard in use. Instead, the demo pivoted to using a paired Magic Keyboard.

How exactly would you replace a keyboard with anything even slightly as productive?

  • Just lay down in bed and put physical keyboard with touchpad on your legs. Many times I work from airbnb or hotel that doesn't have proper chairs or workdesk or from coworking hotdesk when travelling.

  • I probably won’t, but someone probably will. Productive might look quite different.