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Jon Bentley thinks we may be getting tired of touchscreens and craving some tactile twist and toggle

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Have we reached peak touchscreen? Is the future going to see a revival of knobs and switches, or indeed another sort of interface altogether?

Touchscreens are everywhere. And they have lots of advantages. It's far quicker to tap to focus where you want on your camera's touchscreen than to steer your way around using a joystick or D-pad. They give you many more options than physical controls. Hold that 'e' on your touchscreen keyboard and you get nine different diacritics to choose from. The iPhone, now of course nearly 20 years old, proved you could turn a pocket-sized touchscreen into a virtually infinite variety of interfaces to control and create whatever you want. Touchscreens also seem to have taken over new cars altogether, allowing minimalist design to dominate our driving experience.