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My Worst Take Ever

Posted by Matt Birchler
— 1 min read

I was looking through a few posts and found this doozy from 2015:

With this week’s news that Apple is working on a keyboard with literally no moving parts, it hit me like a ton of bricks: of course physical keyboards are on the way out.

And:

Don’t worry if you love a “real keyboard” though, I’m sure they will be around for a long, long time. I just think that the option of buying a laptop with traditional keys will be quite rare, and finding a teenager who prefers them over a full touch screen will be even more so.

I mean I projected out to 2040 in the post, so maybe things will change in the next 18 years, but as of now, this looks like the worst projection I've ever made into the future. Not only have keyboards on desktop computers made zero progress towards disappearing, but:

  1. Apple's attempt to make a keyboard with minimal feedback was a massive failure and they've reverted to classic switches (and people love it).
  2. The iPad got a keyboard that's so preferable to the on-screen one that people like were willing to pay $349-399 for it.
  3. The mechanical keyboard world has gone much more mainstream than ever before.

Who knows, maybe in 2040 I'll look back and laugh at my skepticism, but in the nearly 7 years since this prediction, we've only moved the opposite direction.