“There was this kind of touchscreen mania, where all of a sudden everything became a touchscreen.”
Apple added two buttons to the iPhone 16, stoves and washing machines are going back to knobs, and automakers are putting dials back on dashboards. Rachel Plotnick wrote a 2018 book on buttons and now fields calls from companies that want to make them again. The blind community fought for years to make touchscreens usable, because a touchscreen is a visual interface with a tactile name. The industry ripped out working controls and now pays a historian to explain why people liked them.