There are fewer things more ubiquitous in technology than QWERTY keyboards. If you type anywhere, you almost certainly type the QWERTY way. But why? It turns out that by almost any objective measure, the keyboards we use are decidedly unoptimized. Commonly used keys are too hard to reach; your fingers have to move side to side too much; it requires way too much movement overall. There are a million theories about why QWERTY was invented — the most common one holds that its creator wanted to make sure old typewriter mechanisms didn’t crash into each other as you whacked the keys — but almost everyone agrees, it’s not the best way. And yet, after decades of using it, hardly anybody wants to switch.
On this episode of The Vergecast, we have…
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