Tech companies are clamoring to re-buttonize their products
After years of futilely mashing our fingers onto touch screens, buttons on technology products are making a comeback. I’ve been fascinated by this re-buttonization of tech and once you see it, you’ll notice it everywhere.
There has been a proliferation of tools like the Clicks Keyboard Case, which appends a physical keyboard to your iPhone, BlackBerry style. E-readers like the Nook have started to put page-turning buttons back onto their devices.
Apple even added buttons back to the top of its MacBook Pro keyboards after backlash to the “Touch Bar” that it had it rolled out in 2016. In Apple’s announcement, the company noted, “Physical function keys… replace the Touch Bar, bringing back the familiar, tactile feel of mechanical keys that pro users love.”
Historically, producing custom buttons has been expensive, and as technology advanced in recent decades it became much cheaper for companies to produce touch screen interfaces. Touchscreens also have some benefits: they allow for a more flexible user interface design and make it easy to push updates to products remotely.
