As I have continued reading old WT posts (in September 2015 now), I ran across this:

We believe there’s very strong reasons for our architecture, and folks can explore that

This was in response to a post by Jim who listed a number of things WT had done to make the TB really powerful and flexible (example, 4 cpus rather than 1).

Well, I’ve wondered about a few things WT has done, most of which I figure are them knowing more than me (I know, hard to believe, right?)

But one thing I’ve particularly wondered about - why 8 keys rather than 12?

Sure, there is a logic to saying one key for each finger, but then there is the trade-off of the more characters on a key, the greater chance of a misinterpretation of what you hit. Heck, even makes it harder for the user to tell if they hit the right place on a key. If it was a separate key, your limit both issues.

I figure there is probably a reason, but I sure don’t know what it is. I can only come up with one idea. The larger keys are not divided equally (left to right). The characters that require the finger to move away from the home position are slightly narrower.

Now, I could see how making a narrower key separate could be an issue. That is, the mechanism may not work well when narrower, so you combine it with a larger key. But if that is the case, they could make those 4 columns of keys separate AND make them the same size as the others. The result would be a device which is slightly longer.

Two of the narrow keys takes up about 1.5 inches. So making 6 such keys rather than 2 on each blade would make the total length of one blade 4.5 inches.

Compared to the actual size of the TB now where each blade is 3-5/8 inches. So an increase of 3/8 inch.

I admit, I really admire how great this thing feels while being so small, but I’ve always been curious about this particular decision and is it primarily about being as small as possible. After all, even with the extra length, it would still be far smaller than other options.