The tyranny of touch screens may be coming to an end.
Companies have spent nearly two decades cramming ever more functions onto tappable, swipeable displays. Now buttons, knobs, sliders and other physical controls are making a comeback in vehicles, appliances and personal electronics.
In cars, the widely emulated ultra-minimalism of Tesla’s touch-screen-centric control panels is giving way to actual buttons, knobs and toggles in new models from Kia, BMW’s Mini, and Volkswagen, among others. This trend is delighting reviewers and making the display-focused interiors of Tesla and its imitators feel passé.
Similar re-buttonization is occurring in everything from e-readers to induction stoves.
Thank fuck. So glad I managed to dodge the cars with all touch screen controls. I got one as a loaner after my Civic was totaled in an accident (Thank u for buying me a new car, uninsured, out-of-state white supremacist with a truck too big for any reasonable use!) and it used the touch screen to control the climate control! I had to look away from the road to change the heating!
Just stupid.
Give me simple buttons and knobs I can feel and fix. Capacitives, touch screens, all that nonsense should stick to phones.
I’m okay with the phone being a touch screen. The rest can go back to normal.
I want buttons on my phone too.
I got 3 (Volume rocker and power) and it feels like plenty.
It’s been so long since I had more than 3 and I’m curious. I had an iPhone for work, that had a 4th, the home button on the bottom center of the touch screen and I hated that. What do you want from physical buttons on the phone?
What do you want from physical buttons on the phone?
I would like dedicated back/home/recent keys, like on early Android phones. The back button also functioned as a “disconnect” button for phone calls, which was nice. I still miss it.
Mine has the 2 for volume and 1 for power, as well as a toggle switch to change from silent, vibrate, and sound for the ringer which I quite like.
I want the power button on my phone to protrude like an actual button so I can actually press it. The thing’s like 4mm wide and I’m supposed to somehow push this thing through the gap in the side of my case with my thumb that’s
5x~10x (just checked) the width of the button.As for other buttons, I wouldn’t mind physical buttons for the Android controls at the bottom, but not really a huge deal to me tbh.
Feeling nostalgic for the blackberry?
My last phone before my first smart phone was basically a sidekick (it wasn’t actually a sidekick, but I don’t remember the actual name of it and the sidekick has a similar enough formfactor).
That thing’s texting keyboard was fucking rad. I could type so fucking fast on that. I really want a smart phone with that keyboard.
Maybe the answer is the same as the cases for the iPad mini. A little Bluetooth keyboard case that snaps closed over the screen, with capacity to flip the phone unit around, in case to lay screen up on top of it while closed.
I’m nostalgic for it, but at the same time, I’d be nostalgic for 3.5 seconds if I used one again. People tend to forget how frustrating those devices could be too. I had several iterations of the blackberry, and everyone of them came with a lot of quirks that modern phones just don’t have. Sure, I sort of miss the tactile feel of buttons, but it was also a lot of work punching out long emails on them, and pocket lint did a real number on those things too.
Yeah I don’t care for tactile keyboards because swiping is so much faster.
Blackberry insisted on a 3-row thumboard on the face of the device. I want a 5-row slider, like Samsung’s Relay.
Counter proposal: dynamic tactile buttons.
The tech already existed in 2013, just develop it further.
https://www.robaid.com/gadgets/tactus-technology-haptic-feedback-on-dynamic-user-interface.htm
I am still pissed off about losing Force Touch on the iPhone. Haptic Touch is so much worse and slow. I loved using various pressures with good feedback for things that made sense. It was so much faster and more deliberate than the stupid replacement.
It felt like a great step in this direction, but instead of improving, they just shitcanned it for something much worse.
I want my iPhone button back. It was better. Swiping fucking sucks and it doesn’t work half the time.
In colder parts of the world you actually drive with mittens on. I have no idea how’s that going to work with modern touch screen cars.
I’ve seen gloves with tips on the fingers for using touch screens!
Yeah I have those gloves too. They’re ok for mildly chill weather like 0 °C, but when the inside of the car goes below -10 °C you really begin to miss proper mittens. When it’s -20 °C, mittens are the only realistic option.
They also just don’t work at all when they get wet. This tends to be a problem when your car is covered in snow and ice, of course.
LOL. Several levels deep in first world problems…
I mean, my car is an older Corolla, so almost entirely physical buttons. My phone, however…
I have some. They really suck ass. You can muddle through but it’s not really an ideal solution.
You either have to purchase special capacitance-enabled globes (like silver) or else take them off for every button press that you want to make. :-(
Heated steering wheels
Yeah, that would be nice. My previous car had a diesel engine, so you can imagine how much I would have loved to have a heater in there. Also, the windshield was totally old-school too, so no heating there either. Just start the engine, and start scraping. Every. Morning. Well, at least the seats were warm, but literally nothing else was.
I would have brought it right back and asked for a different loaner, since the HVAC is clearly and visibly missing.
I’m of the opposite opinion. I’m tired of dashboards just absolutely smothered in Technicoloured buttons. I much prefer the touchscreen where everything is centralized. I find it less distracting, personally.
Cars are a very intimate personal thing though, and I understand others frustrations with it. Guess I’m the outlier.
@TheAlbatross I hear ya. My Civic was recently totalled, too. My newer 2024 Civic, ironically enough, has psychical buttons for the heater. The touchscreen is used for other stuff.
I got a '21 VW Golf and, similarly, it’s physical controls for everything I really want and touch screen for the GPS/media center. I can still change volume and tracks with physical buttons on the steering wheel, so that’s all fine.
Kinda miss the Civic. I love the hatchback on the golf and it is a delight to drive, but I think it’s like half a ton heavier than the Civic and that’s not as nice. Still gets phenomenal milage tho
I don’t know where the author got their information, but they name Minis as one company doing this, and it’s absolutely not the case. I just checked to be sure, and the 2026 minis have the same 5-button, one touchscreen setup as the 2025s. My 2020 mini has 15+ physical buttons and toggles.
Unfortunately the buttons are likely still controlled by the central computer rather than having standalone functionality.
When I was a kid if I wanted to turn off the radio I simply hit the “off” button.
Now in my Subaru when I start the car I have to wait for it to wake fully up, while it could be blasting out music very loud (think: if the music when I turned off the vehicle was softer, but now a commercial is the very opposite of soft) until pressing the off button finally thinks through all the ramifications of what it means (in the context of prioritization in relation to other tasks) to actually turn the sound “off”.
I love my car but I definitely prefer the older approach when off = “off”.
So button vs. touchscreen is only part of the underlying set of issues related to computerization and, for some vehicles, the increasing trend towards SAAS.
I’m fine with the phone as is, but vehicles need tactile control panels.
As for tablets, I just buy a keyboard case that folds open and closed like a laptop. That screen will twist around and lay flat to use as a proper tablet, if need be.
I don’t really want to sacrifice screen space on either mobile device, to buttons.
That article reads like it was AI written.
I actually think it was. The 2026 mini is the same as the 2025 mini in having almost no physical buttons, and a giant touchscreen, yet they call minis out by name. Completely incorrect, but got published.
Good, they should’ve never gone away in the first place.
Fuck yeah: Buttons! Keyboards, expandable storage, and swappable batteries next please. I miss being able to accurately touch type on my phone without looking.
Virtual keyboards have never been great and the mainstream ones are getting enshittified more and more (Heliboard is OK with some minor modification, but it’s open source).
Yeah I’m not really a fan of virtual keyboards that are basically querty on the screen. The compact size of the phone kinda demands a different approach.
I use flickboard which helps me minimize typos. My all time favorite virtual keyboard was the now defunct minuum. I was able to reliably touch type with it. I stopped using because it wasn’t open source (but miss it despite that).
https://www.cnet.com/reviews/minuum-keyboard-review/
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=dZh8r-xErGE&pp=0gcJCR4Bo7VqN5tD
Wow, i immediately installed flickboard, thanks!
Alright glad my comment helped!
Virtual keyboards have never been great
I’m actually surprised that nobody ever fundamentally reinvented text input for touchscreens in a way that caught on.
There’s swipe if that counts.
Kind of seems like reinventing the wheel to me, given that I, at least, can maintain like 50wpm on my phone. I have a hard time imagining another design that could let me type faster.
There have been touch-specific keyboard layouts, but not really for English or other languages with Latin characters. You can probably imagine that CJK touch KBs can be pretty creative sometimes though.
I was in a big city recently and had business by their BYD dealership. I walked in as I had never seen any of the cars in person. Two of the models they had had physical controls (both the low(er?)-end ones). If I had planned on buying, that would have ruled 2/3 of what they had out. One complaint about my current vehicle is that it has touchscreen exclusively for all the HVAC controls (I have music controls on the wheel). I’m used to my older cars from (my an '83, '86, '95, '97, and '03 in order of model year) that I could adjust anything without taking my eyes off the road. I don’t mind ALSO having a tablet for navigation and the like, but want my main controls to all be physical.
Great. Now do it with phones too. I don’t want to turn the screen on and look where the media controls are just to skip songs
I’d like to be able to get touchpads with physical buttons on laptops. Very few manufacturers do them, especially if you want three.
Finally! I was hoping to see some better haptic feedback systems but this is great too
The push to re-physicalize interfaces has even led to an unexpected side gig for Dr. Plotnick, the academic authority on buttons. Companies are tapping her to consult on how to improve their physical controls.
Well played.
I’ve been pining for my Blackberry for over a decade. Oh, we’re talking about cars? Yeah those are even worse.
