Button of the month: a dive into how we interact with our devices on a physical, tactile level

Buttons feel magical. You press here, and invisible connections make something happen elsewhere. But “magical” is probably not how I’d describe most public drinking fountains.

Who among us hasn’t walked up to a drinking fountain, expecting a bubbling stream of life-giving water, only to experience the crushing disappointment of a measly trickle after smashing in that button?

Before the iPhone, before Android, before webOS, a revolutionary soap bar of a phone made it incredibly easy to get shit done. The Danger Hiptop, better known as the T-Mobile Sidekick, made the internet portable and affordable like no phone before.

It introduced cloud sync long before iCloud, popularized unlimited data and real web browsing on mobile, and made instant messaging and email a breeze thanks to its landscape hardware keyboard.

Long before the self-lit pixels of OLED phones illuminated our lives, there was a time many portable gadgets didn’t shine at all. Remember when the display of practically every Nintendo Game Boy was designed to be viewed by sunlight? Remember when it was tough to tell time with your average wristwatch after dark?

But in 1992, Timex popularized a push-button technology that could bathe any small display in a soothing, sea-green glow. And even though the actual button was often bad, it literally changed the face of portable electronics.

When you think about it, adding two extra buttons to a keyboard, a peripheral that already has dozens of keys built in, is kind of ridiculous. Why add more buttons when so many modern keyboards already let you customize their existing keys to do exactly what you want? Are you really so attached to your dusty old Pause Break key that you’re not prepared to reassign it?

And yet, the appearance alone of 8BitDo’s Dual Super Buttons offers half the answer. The peripheral buttons are giant, red, and look like you should be yelling “fire the torpedoes” with every press. Even if you don’t immediately have a use for them, they have a playful and fun design that makes you want to experiment and seek one out. You buy a functional, understated device like the Stream Deck because you have a use for it. You buy the Dual Super Buttons because you want to find a use.

The most significant new thing in the iPhone 15 Pro this year isn’t its lighter titanium frame, new A17 Pro processor, or its camera system (although all are appreciated). For me, it’s the Action Button: the little button above the volume keys that replaces the mute switch that had been on every iPhone since the very first one.

The Action Button is perhaps the biggest hardware upgrade the iPhone line has received in years. It’s not a particularly advanced piece of technology — it’s literally just a button — but its programmability lets you use your iPhone in completely new ways.

The press of a single button can mean the difference between winning thousands of dollars on national television — or winning nothing at all. Jeopardy!’s buzzer is arguably the most infamous game show button; over the past 59 years, the “signaling device” has become a behind-the-scenes character of its own. The button on a stick inspires future contestants to train their hand-eye coordination, reaction time, and handling, all in an attempt to gain mere milliseconds over the competition.

How do you practice such a specific skill set? Jeopardy!’s producers don’t hand out buzzers. Many players have used clicky pens or Pez dispensers to simulate the signaling device, but you can’t measure milliseconds of improvement that way.

In the wide world of wristwatches, there is no easier way to dress to your aesthetic or customize your timepiece than by swapping straps and bands. There are all kinds of straps out there, from nylon NATOs and leather bund straps to hotly debated metal link bracelets. Most watch straps are universal across similarly sized traditional watches, an open ecosystem for anyone to explore.

But none are as simple and convenient as the proprietary little band release buttons on the underside of every Apple Watch.

Like many great products, the Elgato Stream Deck wasn’t exactly a new idea.

When the very first one debuted six years ago this month, we instantly compared it to Art Lebedev’s legendary Optimus Maximus keyboard, which promised an array of swirling OLED screens under your fingertips an entire decade earlier. Razer, too, pioneered LCD keys before their time, tacking them onto a keyboard and the company’s very first Blade laptop.

It’s easy to see why gadget makers are so fixated on touchscreens. Swiping is intuitive. It enables sleek lines for a futuristic aesthetic. It’s the easiest way to banish bezels and maximize screen real estate. So I understood why Fitbit was chuffed when it introduced the inductive button on the Fitbit Charge 3. Begone side button protrusion, and behold the slim profile of a modern fitness tracker!

This is what an unforced error looks like.

It is 28 degrees Fahrenheit on top of this mountain, before you factor in the wind that’s blowing snow sideways into my face. I’m sitting on a rock with my soda can-sized backpacking stove the size of a soda can trying to make lunch and regretting my decision to go hiking in the middle of February. I press a small button on a pen-size rod that I’m holding over the burner, bringing a spark to life for just an instant. The familiar whoosh of gas igniting means I can start heating up ramen — lucky me.

But wait, how did pressing that button cause a spark? My lighter doesn’t have a flint and steel or any batteries. It’s not even solar powered (not that I remember what sunlight looks like; it’s winter in Washington). So how can it start a fire? Magic? No, it’s actually an interesting quirk of physics and material science. Come, sit by this sad replacement for a campfire with me, and I’ll tell you how it works using an example from happy summer days rather than miserable winter afternoons.

Every evening, my kids beg for “Mario,” and I know what that means — watching their old man wrestle with a pair of Nintendo Switch Joy-Con controllers while hopefully saving a princess. It’s not always easy timing tricky jumps in Super Mario 64 and Super Mario Sunshine, especially not when the controls are fighting you.

That’s not a lame dad excuse: we beat both games, and we’re on to Super Mario Galaxy now. But I can’t count how many times Joy-Con drift sent my mustachioed plumber plunging to his doom. When my left Joy-Con died, Mario started walking off edges all by himself. Now, my right Joy-Con is a distracted boyfriend meme, its erroneous joystick signals always aiming me in the wrong direction. This’ll be my third set of Joy-Cons in five years, and I’ve had enough.

From pirates to spies to kid detectives, it’s a common Hollywood trope: hold a simple spyglass or binoculars up to your eyes, and you’ll get a crystal-clear cylindrical picture of what’s going on.

That’s horseshit, of course. Unless you’ve got the hands of a surgeon, it’s surprisingly hard to line up eyeballs, multiple pieces of glass, and a faraway subject. Kid Sean was sad to learn that fact. But I’ll never forget the day Teen Sean pressed the magic button that made all the difference: the button atop the image-stabilized binoculars that Canon still sells today.

The Pixel 2 is an almost five-year-old phone, but it introduced a feature that I miss more and more with each passing year. It was called Active Edge, and it let you summon Google Assistant just by giving your phone a squeeze. In some ways, it’s an unusual idea. But it effectively gave you something sorely lacking on modern phones: a way to physically interact with the phone to just get something done.

Looking at the sides of the Pixel 2 and 2 XL, you won’t see anything to indicate that you’re holding anything special. Sure, there’s a power button and volume rocker, but otherwise, the sides are sparse. Give the phone’s bare edges a good squeeze, though, and a subtle vibration and animation will play, as Google Assistant pops up from the bottom of the screen, ready to start listening to you. You don’t have to wake the phone up, long-press on any physical or virtual buttons, or tap the screen. You squeeze and start talking.

The Steam Deck has a lot of buttons. There’s a D-pad, all the typical face buttons, two control sticks that also respond to capacitive touch and can be pushed down like buttons, two trackpads with haptic feedback that are also pressure-sensitive buttons, two shoulder bumpers, two analog shoulder triggers, and four buttons on the back of the device behind the grips.

Somehow, they all feel like they’re exactly in the right place while you’re holding the device, and in writing the latest in our long-running Button of the Month series, you might think that I’d wax poetic about just one of them. But for me, the true magic of the Steam Deck is that any button can be the awesome button, thanks to the device’s excellent software.

The first time I started a car by pressing a button, it felt too easy and convenient — like I had somehow stumbled into a tax bracket I don’t belong in. “You’re telling me,” I thought, “that I can just leave my keys in my pocket, and the car will let me get in and drive around?”

The push-button ignition is one of those buttons that doesn’t really add any new functionality over the thing it’s replacing (in this case, the ignition system that has you insert and turn a key). It exists solely for the sake of convenience, a job that it excels at. You get in the car, press down on the brake pedal and a button, and you’re ready to drive. It’s barely more difficult than unlocking your phone.

In the age of aesthetically pleasing morning routines, a cheap electric coffee maker can feel a bit dated — something to begrudgingly use at the office rather than a gadget that brings joy to your kitchen. And while I love the fancy coffee gadgets that require a manual, multi-step ritual, there’s one thing that makes me turn to a standard Mr. Coffee machine every morning: its dead-simple “brew now” button that instantly starts the process of getting caffeine into my body.

The single-button operation means I don’t have to navigate the complexities of brewing temps or ratios while I’m still half-asleep. I just press it, it lights up, and the machine gurgles to life, heating up water and pushing it up a tube onto the coffee grounds I’ve added to it. The only decision I have to make is how much coffee I’ll need to get through the day.

In 2007, the iPhone ushered in an era of touchscreen gadgets that caused most buttons to vanish from our phones forever. But there was one brief moment in the gray, transitory haze between buttons and touchscreens that an unlikely company tried to fuse the two together. BlackBerry split the difference by boldly asking, “What if a touchscreen was also a hardware button?”

Thus was born the BlackBerry Storm, a device whose entire touchscreen doubled as a pressable button. The Storm was one of the first (and last) attempts to bridge the legacy world of physical keyboards and the modern world of touchscreens. But to understand the existence of the BlackBerry Storm and its bizarre clicking screen, we first need to go back and understand BlackBerry at the height of its power — and why it wanted to keep buttons alive.

PC or console? Mouse and keyboard, or controller? It’s a debate that’s raged for nearly as long as video games themselves. So in 2013, Valve — creator of games like Half-Life and Portal, and the founder of Steam, the beating heart of PC gaming — attempted to fuse the two camps together.

The Steam Controller was originally introduced as part of Valve’s Steam Machine push. The initiative attempted to convince partners to build gaming PCs that would sit in a living room like an Xbox or a PlayStation, but run the massive library of PC games already available on Steam. Plenty of PC owners have hooked up their computer to their television, but the Steam Machine project had bigger ambitions to turn living room PC gaming into a platform.

The most important button on the original Xbox wasn’t the power button: it was the button to eject the disc tray.

Conceptually, this doesn’t make sense. Of course the power button should be the most important button — it turns on (and off) the whole console. But that attitude is steeped in our understanding of modern devices, where our games and apps are far more self-contained than they were during the original Xbox’s heyday.

The first phone I ever owned was a Motorola Razr. The Razr’s buttons are some of the finest ever to grace a mobile device. The keypad is laser-etched out of a sheet of shimmering aluminum, and when pressed, ignites in a lambent blue glow that looked like the sci-fi future.

But there was one button that I was terrified to press. In all my years of owning a Razr, I can’t say I tapped it more than once or twice, and never on purpose: the internet button.