What was pretty much what happened until smartphones got some better predictive typing software. That made the keyboard much more usable.

His mistake wasn't in assessing the issues, just that he could not see that there's software solutions to fix those.

The criticism still holds (witness car tactile-vs-touch UX discussions) but a touch keyboard is not worse enough to outweigh the advantages of overall more screen space.

And more importantly, the apple reality distortion field is enough to compensate for small issues like "it has no copy and paste" and "it's missing a keyboard", especially when it had plenty of upsides, like an OS that didn't make you feel like it was written by the lowest bidder, a nice screen (compared to contemporary smartphones) so you wouldn't hate watching videos on it, and iTunes integration, which was leagues better than the niche integrations smartphones had at the time.

The complaints were valid, but they weren't nearly enough to make the device bad.

Now, how many people can spend $3500 on a headset where the main use cases are "watch a movie", when those same people probably also have a really nice TV? Everyone keeps talking about how it's "very interesting" but how many of you have actually tried to watch a movie in a VR headset? It's not comfortable, not just from screen specs, since those don't really matter. The weight and face gasket suck to have on. You can't engineer that away.

This is not inaccurate. I still hate typing on my phone compared to something with a real keyboard. It’s that the benefits of a touch interface massively outweigh the negatives.

I don't hate it, but I'll never be anywhere near as fast as on a real keyboard. It's a shame there aren't new paradigms for input. I loved the Nintype keyboard, which combined swiping with tapping for impressive speeds (though still less than a real keyboard), but that's abandonware at this point.

LLM babysitting typing would defo be new and potentially amazing.

Let’s go even further back

https://512pixels.net/2009/01/early-macintosh-reviews-show-d...

> Apple makes the arrogant assumption of thinking that it knows what you want and need. It, unfortunately, leaves the “why” out of the equation — as in “why would I want this?” The Macintosh uses an experimental pointing device called a ‘mouse’. There is no evidence that people want to use these things. I dont want one of these new fangled devices.

John C. Dvorak

I suspect eye tracking with small relaxed hand gestures will be like this. It will be as far beyond clicking with a mouse, as the mouse was beyond text and keyboard only.

I've been idly imagining how my work experience would be different if I had eye tracking and hand gesture recognition these last few days, and I keep noticing times when I wish I had it.