Touch screens are over. Even Apple is bringing back buttons.

Companies have spent nearly two decades trying to fit more functionality than ever onto touchable, swipeable screens. Now knobs, knobs, sliders, and other physical controls are making a comeback in vehicles, appliances, and personal electronics.

In cars, the widely imitated ultra-minimalism of Tesla’s touchscreen-centric control panels is giving way to actual buttons, knobs, and toggles in new models from Kia, BMW Mini, and Volkswagen, among others. This trend pleases critics and makes the screen-focused interiors of Tesla and its imitators seem outdated.

Similar re-buttoning is happening in everything from e-readers to induction cooktops.

Perhaps the most prominent representative of this button explosion is the company that turned us to touchscreens in the first place. After introducing the feature on its luxury Apple Watch Ultra and Pro model iPhones over the past few years, Apple has added a third button, which it calls the “action button,” to the full roster of new iPhone 16s launching this month. Button-like “camera control” input on the side of the iPhone.

As Apple shows, companies aren’t just reinventing buttons, they’re also redesigning them. Camera control includes touch capabilities, and the company has also developed the “force sensor” that allows the AirPods to respond when you squeeze their stems.

Often influenced by user complaints, engineers and industrial designers are taking advantage of our highly sensitive sense of touch and spatial awareness, known as proprioception. And it’s all in the service of making gadgets easier, more fun, and in some cases, safer to use. We want to touch or activate cruise control without taking our eyes off the road.

Why did buttons become sensors?

Understanding why buttons are back in a world where any control is possible helps us understand how we arrived at the current, often sad state of human-machine interfaces.

Touchscreens have their merits, which explains the initial enthusiasm for them. As much as we miss those clicky little keyboards, we can do a lot more by tapping on our iPhones than we could with the old-school BlackBerry.

While increased production has driven down the prices of such displays, they have become something of a crutch for gadget designers and corporate bean counters.

“Touchscreens are now the cheapest option, so they’re being used everywhere, even places they don’t belong,” says Sam Calisch, CEO of Copper, a startup that makes induction stoves for cooking. This has led to poor design decisions, such as induction stoves with touch-based controls that become inoperable when a pot boils, as my Wall Street Journal colleague Nicole Nguyen complained last year.

Even if our devices have buttons, they are often flat like touch screens and have similar deficiencies. Capacitive buttons sit flush against hard surfaces and don’t actually move when you press them, so they can only indicate they’re activated via sound or light. They too took over because they were cheap and easy to incorporate into printed circuit boards already inside devices, whereas adding physical switches meant additional wiring and complexity, says Calisch.

Anyone who’s known the pain of having to mash a capacitive button on a newer washer, dryer, or dishwasher knows how uniquely frustrating such cost-cutting measures masquerading as futuristic interfaces can be.

The dangers of ‘touch’ interfaces

Fundamentally, the problem with touch-based interfaces is that they are not touch-based at all because they require us to look when using them. For example, consider your smartphone’s screen, which requires your undivided gaze when you press its smooth surface.

Ultimately, “touchscreen” is a misnomer, says Rachel Plotnick, professor of film and media studies at Indiana University Bloomington and author of the 2018 book “The Power Button: A History of Pleasure, Panic, and Repulsion.” ,” the definitive history of buttons. He says such interfaces would be more accurately described as “vision-based.”

The dangers of burying most of a vehicle’s controls in touch-screen menus that require drivers to look at them have become so obvious that the European automotive safety agency has declared that vehicles must have physical switches and buttons to achieve the highest safety rating. Responding to criticism from drivers, Volkswagen has promised to bring back physical controls for some frequently used features, such as climate control.

BMW Mini’s newer electric vehicles are packed with physical controls. To keep drivers’ eyes on the road, industrial designers at Mini installed a user-customizable head-up display in their vehicles that drivers can navigate using buttons and the scroll wheel on the steering wheel, says Patrick McKenna, head of product and marketing at Mini USA. These controls can also be accessed from the vehicle’s round touch screen and via the voice assistant. He adds that the whole point of vehicle interfaces is redundancy, security and reducing distractions.

Satisfying switches and clicky keyboards

The return to physical interfaces also means a change in many aspects. With the ubiquity of touch screens, things once considered luxuries are now becoming tacky. Well-executed physical controls now signal the thoughtfulness and exclusivity once built into the original iPhone.

Get induction range knobs from copper. Made from walnut, it allows cooks to know the heat level they have set on the stove without looking, just like the physical knobs on a gas stove. Calisch, who admits that he has placed capacitive touch sensors in other electronic devices he has designed in the past, says this is intentional.

Physical controls are effective in part because of our sixth sense, known as proprioception. Unlike the sense of touch, proprioception describes our innate awareness of where our body parts are located. This is why we can know the position of all our limbs in three-dimensional space, down to the precise position of our fingertips.

Creating good physical interfaces is not just about the benefit of stimulating our sense of touch; The return of the big button is also about joy. Think of the satisfying weight of the volume knob on a hi-fi stereo, or how a proper ergonomic keyboard can make typing less of a chore.

A good example of this sense of fun is the hand crank on the side of the Playdate portable video game system, which also features a familiar, plus-shaped D-pad and two buttons. Special projects director Greg Maletic says plugging a controller that works like an old coffee grinder’s crank into a device that resembles the original Gameboy is odd, but it also introduces new game mechanics that would be cumbersome or even impossible on other devices. Panic is the company that makes Playdate.

Musical instrument makers have always understood the importance of physical controls. Teenage Engineering, the Swedish consumer electronics company with which Panic partnered to make Playdate, produces a variety of synthesizers filled with a dizzying array of knobs, sliders and knobs.

Once you know what to look for, it becomes clear that this kind of design thinking is popping up everywhere, and adding physical controls back to a device that’s been nefariously stripped of them can unlock new types of interactivity and benefits.

E-readers started adding page back buttons. While Amazon has abandoned such buttons on its Kindles, rivals from Kobo, Nook, and Boox now offer models that include them.

Similarly, Apple, which ushered in the touchscreen era with the introduction of the iPhone in 2007, is adding a surprising variety of buttons to devices that seem to have never existed before.

After replacing them with a touchscreen strip that it introduced as the Touch Bar to much fanfare in 2016, it restored the physical function keys on the keyboards on its MacBook Pro computers in 2021. Apple boasted that restoring physical switches “brings back the familiar, tactile feel of mechanical switches that pro users love.”

The effort to re-physicalize interfaces was led by Dr. Dr., an academic authority on buttons. It even led to Plotnick taking on an unexpected side hustle. Companies turn to him for advice on how to improve their physical control. These consultations, which include advising on the function of potentially life-saving buttons on medical devices, are essentially aimed at making interactions with machines less intimidating and more intuitive.

“You know, even though it seems like the simplest thing in the world, there’s often a lot of skill behind pushing the button,” he says.