Tech companies are clamoring to re-buttonize their products

The WSJ has been on the button beat for a while. In a 2023 piece titled What Our Phones, Cars and Refrigerators Need: More Buttons, writer Nicole Nguyen detailed the challenges of touch screen interfaces being deployed in kitchen objects. After a pot of water boiled over on her induction stove, she was unable to turn down the burner because the touch screen has gotten wet. “I rage poked,” she wrote, “where a simple knob would have sufficed.”