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After a decade-plus of touch screens, brands across various industries are turning back to the tried-and-true pleasures of physical buttons for their newest products.
Why It Hits: Although touch screens have seemed like the technology of the future, people have been clamoring for a return to the “older” tech due to safety concerns, its intuitiveness, and the simple joy of pushing a big button.
Between The Switches: Knobs, switches, sliders, buttons, and click wheels are the new markers of luxury.
- Apple, the company that mainstreamed touch screens, added an “action button” and a “camera control” button to its new iPhone 16 models. The latter is actually a dynamic button that allows users to slide along it to adjust settings.
- Carmakers like BMW and Kia have ditched touch displays in favor of dials and switches that won’t force drivers to look at a screen (Europe now only gives its highest automotive safety rating to cars with physical buttons).
- The button revolution is even coming for induction stoves (Copper), e-readers (Kobo), handheld gaming (Playdate), and synthesizers (Teenage Engineering).
Final Push: WSJ notes that our innate love of physical switches is due to “proprioception” — our spatial awareness in 3D spaces. In other words, buttons are simply more intuitive to the human condition. Maybe Star Wars and Blade Runner were onto something when they depicted technology still chock full of knobs. But with smart screens here to stay, the best buttons may be the ones that can mix physical pleasure with digital utility like Apple — the best of both worlds.
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