I was reminded of this again when I saw the Air unveiling. One can move it around, make it smaller. Make disappear until we need it - pretty hard with physical objects. But mostly it's in the way.

OK, myths and other stones that haven't been turned over:

1. You need a keyboard to hold up your (laptop) screen.

No one doesn't. The iPad cases demonstrate this.

2. You need a keyboard

Not a lot of the time. You need to be able to create words and text. Occasionally one needs to be able to originate a lot of text or do some editing.

0. We need real keyboard because speech doesn't work.

True now, but that doesn't change that speech is primary (over typing) for most humans. That's certainly true in their houses, though not perhaps so much in the street, on the bus, at work or in their boudoirs. Also note that speech is mostly primary in the street, certainly in cars and lot of workplaces have people who do business on the phone all day long. This is a long, but inevitable project.

3. The keyboard is as small as it can be, and still be comfortable.

Even the small wireless keyboard has huge hulking batteries in it and is about 4mm thicker than it needs to be to keep the physical sensation of typing.

A smaller keyboard could go _on top_ of the screen if the screen was lowered and slanted to the right angle. We already know we don't need a real physical keyboard most of the time.

There's another opportunity here: if the screen knows that is has a keyboard on it and where, then the text can originate in the right place - just above the keyboard, like a typewriter or Jef Raskin's Cat.

Oh and we can use induction to keep it charged. We pretty much always know where it is, and we can find places to put it otherwise - locators on the base of the iMac or riff off of the magnetic holder for the remote and iSight.