I suspect you’re scoffing. The primary knock on Mr. Raskin’s information appliance was that it didn’t do a whole lot. This is also the main criticism of the Echo and, now, the Echo Show. These devices can’t do anything you can’t do on your phone, PC or tablet.

That’s true, but it also kind of misses the point. You can make toast in the oven, but you have a toaster because it’s designed to perform a specific task reliably and without any fuss.

That’s the point of the information appliance, too. There’s a whole lot the Echo Show won’t do. It won’t do email. It won’t do the web. It won’t play first-person shooters. It is emphatically, purposely not a general-purpose computer. But what it does do — play music and videos, make video calls, tell you the news, tell you the time and weather, and shop at Amazon — it does with such surpassing ease that it feels like a magic trick.

There are a few reasons for that. One is the Show’s unusual and quietly innovative interface.

Dave Limp, Amazon’s senior vice president for devices, told me that when the company was first designing the Show, it tried to use the same interface that it used for its tablet computers. But the team soon realized this didn’t work. For one thing, the Echo Show is designed to be used just with your voice — the screen adds extra information, but you have to look at it only when you specifically ask for visual information (such as when you want a video). A standard mobile operating system, which is heavily visual, just wouldn’t work.

Another reason a tablet interface wouldn’t have worked is that it felt too much like a computer, and one overriding design goal of the Echo and the Echo Show was to hide any relationship to anything computerlike.

The Show’s operating system, memory, storage and other specifications are completely hidden from users. The Echo does have a version of apps, known as “skills,” but they aren’t anything like smartphone apps. You install them just by asking Alexa to enable them, and when you want to use one, you just name it. To watch a video, you just ask for the video — you don’t load up a web browser or the YouTube app and then search for it.

“It’s a very different mental model than the traditional computer, smartphone or tablet, where you have to think of which app you want to use and then open it and then dive in,” Mr. Limp wrote in an email.