"An interface is supposed to make things easier"

I disagree with this, but I'm struggling to counter it with something pithy. The problem is that there are so many ways to compare interfaces. The best I can do is point at humanity's adoption of the keyboard, which was a monumental shift. There are so many angles that you could write a book on the topic, and I'm sure plenty have been.

The keyboard predates the computer, but they're so closely connected that it's hard to pick their relationship apart. It wasn't just a happy coincidence that typewriters were laying around with the perfect input method when we invented the computer. Babbage built his computing machines without any obvious keyboard-like device (afaik), but Turing laid the foundation for general-purpose computing to crack the Enigma, a machine with a keyboard.

So during the World War II era, it was inevitable that the typed character was the future, but you'd struggle to convince people that there was a point in learning how to use a keyboard. You don't need a typewriter to writer a letter to someone, and besides, it's so much more ugly and impersonal than your own handwriting. Women could learn to type and get jobs as secretaries, but this also meant that their bosses didn't have to learn. My grandfather was an accountant during this time, and just like any other accountant, he did his work on specially-ruled sheets of paper, pen in hand. Even in academia today, we have stuff like LaTeX but people don't actually work in that, right? I claim ignorance but I'm assuming people still do everything by hand and then figure out how to format it on a computer.

So what defines easy? None of that was easy. In many examples, it's so much harder, not to mention more expensive. Most importantly, no interface comes naturally. Typing is a learned skill, and even if you're young enough to have grown up with keyboards, you still sucked at one point. The same is true of handwriting. In my mind, "easy" only comes in to play when you're comparing two interfaces that use the same fundamental principles. If I build a QWERTY keyboard that requires you to apply ten pounds of pressure to register a keystroke, you can point and say, "that is supposed to be easier."

I guess my point is just that you have to weigh the potential use cases. A full-size keyboard is best for programming, or for writing an internet comment, but it's not ideal for keeping a journal while hiking in the mountains.

To me, it seems like the handheld computer is still yearning for the right input method, and the need grows stronger as the computers get more powerful. Forget comparing the latest smartphone processors to the computers that got us to the moon, they're faster than the ones that we bought a few years ago and still have in our closets! But they aren't that useful, and it's so clearly because of that goddamn little touchscreen keyboard (or depending on how you look at it, our own stubby thumbs). We've tried so many things-- even returning to handwriting-- but they haven't worked. So we keep trying.

The way I see it, we're blocked and the only clear way forward is to devise a novel character input method, which is what these guys are trying to do. I hope that works out. If not, maybe we'll eventually be driven to completely discard the typed character in search of something more expressive and natural for human-computer interfaces. Of course, we can just give up and admit that this 19th century invention is the best we'll ever do.