Could today’s teenagers make QWERTY obsolete? The world’s most widely recognised keyboard layout was designed in the 1870s for typewriters, partly to reduce the chances of mechanical keys hitting each other when people typed quickly. The typewriter disappeared, but its keyboard layout stayed. Computers adopted it, so did smartphones. That was because people were accustomed to it, while changing the layout would mean teaching billions to learn typing afresh. Alternatives such as Dvorak and Colemak may reduce finger movement, but few want to relearn something as basic as typing. That could change with today’s teenagers, who already use swipes, clicks, predictive text, voice and AI. For QWERTY, that could be the last tap.
