Elevator buttons can sometimes be fickle things — confusing labels or tricky security systems can start a trip up or down a building off on a slightly sour note. But on the control panel, there’s one button that stands out for its ability to make someone’s day instead of ruining it: the open door button.

There’s no mystery as to what its job is. If the elevator doors are open, pressing and holding the open door button will usually make sure they stay that way. If the doors have started to close, jabbing the button often adorned with an icon of opposing arrows should stop the process and make the elevator accessible again.

What makes the open door button special is that it gives elevator passengers (the ones standing within arm’s reach of the control panel, anyways) a rare opportunity: the ability to help out a stranger with little to no effort or inconvenience. For many of us, it’s become almost an instinct to press the button when we see someone running or walking with purpose toward the elevator we’re currently in, letting them get on instead of having to wait around for another car to come by.

In the context of controlling a machine or gadget, the open door button stands out in another way. Usually, when we press a button, it’s to make something happen — we want to turn on a coffee maker, take an action in a game, or warm a burrito up just a tad more. Not many buttons are made to prevent something from happening, but that’s exactly what you’re doing by telling the elevator to keep the doors open. In fact, I’m not sure I can think of any other buttons I use in my daily life that I press to explicitly tell a system to just keep everything the way it is right now.

Often in this column, we talk about the tactile experience of using a button. That’s not really possible with the open door button because, while many elevators have it, the button itself has a wide range of physical forms. Some of them are sublime, heavy metal buttons with a satisfying click and a light that indicates that, yes, the control unit has received your message and is working on opening the doors. Some of them are awful — the gross plastic ones that provide barely any feedback, like you’re mashing on a broken butterfly key.

For the most part, though, the actual physical sensation of pressing the open door button (sometimes frantically, at the last second before the doors fully close) is secondary. The real reward for pressing it is the emotional rush; you’ve helped a stranger not miss a meeting or given a friend extra time to maneuver something heavy into the lift.

This is slightly overdramatic, but as I watch another person make it through the open doors and into the elevator, I feel like a bit of a hero. We humans worked together to stop the machine from coldly carrying out its mechanical route without any regard for humanity’s needs.

If I’ve learned anything from comics, though, a hero’s best gadgets also have a villainous counterpart — Spider-Man flies around the city on webs, while the Green Goblin uses a hoverboard. For the open door button, that’s, perhaps unsurprisingly, the close door button.

Its evil is twofold; if the open door button gives us a chance to help someone out, a button that lets us close the door gives us a chance to screw someone over for the chance to get to our floor a bit faster. Sure, there are times when closing the door won’t harm anyone, like if we know for sure that no one else needs to ride the elevator, but more often than not, the close door button exists to tempt our selfish instincts.

Photo: Getty Images / EyeEm

It’s also almost certainly useless. According to The New York Times, close door buttons on pretty much every elevator in service today don’t actually make the doors close any faster unless you have a special key or code meant for firefighters or service personnel. This is, apparently, thanks to a mandate in the Americans With Disabilities Act that requires most elevator doors to stay open for at least 20 seconds — even if someone immediately gets in the car and starts jamming the close door button. While its uselessness is probably good for humanity, a button that doesn’t do what you expect is a bad button.

Thankfully, the open door button does actually do what it’s meant to. And in a world of buttons that we push to make our life easier, it’s a refreshing reminder that sometimes a button can be used to make someone else’s life easier, too.

PS: if you’re a fan of elevator buttons, definitely check out this iconic piece of Verge lore about the extremely confusing ones at our office.

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.

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

We’ll talk about how useful this is in a second, but I don’t want to gloss over just how cool it feels. Phones are rigid objects made of metal and plastic, and yet, the Pixel can tell when I’m applying more pressure than I do just holding it. According to an old iFixit teardown, this is made possible by a few strain gauges mounted to the inside of the phone that can detect the ever so slight bend in your phone’s case when you squeeze it. For the record, this is a change my human nervous system is incapable of picking up on; I can’t tell that the phone is bending at all.

Whether you found Active Edge useful probably came down to whether you liked using Google Assistant, as illustrated by this Reddit thread. Personally, the only time I ever really used a voice assistant on a daily basis was when I had the Pixel 2 because it was literally right at hand. The thing that made it so convenient is that the squeeze basically always worked. Even if you were in an app that hid the navigation buttons or your phone’s screen was completely off, Active Edge still did its job.

While that made it extremely useful for looking up fun facts or doing quick calculations and conversions, I’d argue that Active Edge could’ve been so much more useful had you been able to remap it. I enjoyed having the assistant, but if I had been able to turn on my flashlight with a squeeze, I would’ve had instant access to the most important features of my phone no matter what.

This version of the feature actually existed. HTC’s U11, which came out a few months before the Pixel 2, had a similar but more customizable feature called Edge Sense. The two companies worked together on the Pixel and Pixel 2, which explains how it ended up on Google’s devices. That same year, Google bought HTC’s mobile division team.

Active Edge was not Google’s first attempt at providing an alternative to using the touchscreen or physical buttons to control your phone, either. A few years before the Pixel 2, Motorola was letting you open the camera by twisting your phone and turn on the flashlight with a karate chop — not unlike how you shuffled music on a 2008 iPod Nano. The camera shortcut came about during the relatively short amount of time that Google owned Motorola.

As time went on, though, phone manufacturers moved further away from being able to access a few essential features with a physical action. Take my daily driver, an iPhone 12 Mini, for instance. To launch Siri, I have to press and hold the power button, which has become burdened with responsibilities since Apple got rid of the home button. To turn on the flashlight, something I do multiple times a day, I have to wake up the screen and tap and hold the button in the left-hand corner. The camera is slightly more convenient, being accessible with a left swipe on the lock screen, but the screen still has to be on for that to work. And if I’m actually using the phone, the easiest way to access the flashlight or camera is through Control Center, which involves swiping down from the top-right corner and trying to pick out one specific icon from a grid.

In other words, if I look up from my phone and notice my cat doing something cute, he may very well have stopped by the time I actually get the camera open. It’s not that it’s difficult to launch the camera or turn on the flashlight — it’s just that it could be so much more convenient if there were a dedicated button or squeeze gesture. Apple even briefly acknowledged this when it made a battery case for the iPhone that had a button to launch the camera. A few seconds saved here or there add up over the lifetime of a phone.

Just to prove the point, here’s how fast launching the camera is on my iPhone versus the Samsung Galaxy S22, where you can double-click the power button to launch the camera:

Neither phone handles screen recording and previewing the camera very well, but the S22 gets its camera app open before I’ve even tapped the camera icon on the iPhone.

Unfortunately, even Google’s phones aren’t immune to the vanishing of physical buttons. Active Edge stopped showing up on Pixels with the 4A and 5 in 2020. Samsung has also done away with a button it once included to summon a virtual assistant (which, tragically, happened to be Bixby).

There have been attempts to add virtual buttons that you activate by interacting with the device. Apple, for example, has an accessibility feature that lets you tap on the back of your phone to launch actions or even your own mini programs in the form of Shortcuts, and Google added a similar feature to Pixels. But to be perfectly honest, I just haven’t found them reliable enough. A virtual button that barely ever works isn’t a great button. Active Edge worked pretty much every single time for me, despite the fact that I had a beefy OtterBox on my phone.

It’s not that physical controls on phones are completely gone. As I alluded to before, Apple lets you launch things like Apple Pay and Siri through a series of taps or presses on the power button, and there’s no shortage of Android phones that let you launch the camera or other apps by double-pressing the power button.

I’d argue, though, that one or two shortcuts assigned to a single button cannot give us easy access to everything we should have easy access to. To be clear, I’m not demanding that my phone be absolutely covered in buttons, but I think big manufacturers should take a cue from phones of the past (and, yes, from smaller phone makers — I see you Sony fans) and bring back at least one or two physical shortcuts. As Google showed, that doesn’t necessarily require adding an extra physical key that has to be waterproofed. Something as simple as a squeeze can be a button that lets users quickly access features that they — or in the Pixel’s case, Google — deem essential.

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.

It’s also, for most of us, anyway, the most raw power we can generate with just our fingertips. Flipping a switch on a surge protector could give you access to nearly 2,000 watts. That’s not a small sum, but pushing a button to start a car gives you the power to move yourself, your family, luggage, and, oh yeah, a machine that weighs thousands of pounds at highway speeds.

Image: Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

The actual buttons themselves are relatively standard across the auto industry, which is surprising considering how different regular old keys can be. Every one I’ve seen has been circular, located somewhere to the right of the steering wheel, and has lighting to indicate that your car is on. There are some safety measures — many cars guard against accidental starts by requiring a simultaneous press of the brake pedal. Personally, it feels like just the right mix of convenience and manual process — the foot / hand coordination makes it feel like you’re doing something, but you don’t have the annoyance of fiddling with a key.

When I started writing this, I was under the impression that push-button start was a relatively modern feature, but its origins go back over a century. One of the first cars with a button-based ignition was the 1912 Cadillac Model 30, which had you press a button to activate the electric starter that replaced the engine crank. Of course, this was still pretty early days for “motor cars,” so the convenience factor was sort of diminished by the few other steps (like setting the engine’s fuel / air ratio and spark timing) you had to do. Still, it feels fair to describe the Model 30 as having a push-button start. It was also keyless, not because it wirelessly communicated with a fob the way modern cars do (obviously), but because there just… wasn’t a key at all.

At some point, though, people realized that there should probably be a way to prevent just anybody from starting up your car. There was a period when cars had keys to unlock the ignition switch, but you weren’t actually turning on the car with the key. By the 1950s, though, many cars were coming equipped with the turnkey ignition system most of us are familiar with today, supplanting the system of buttons and levers. And that’s mostly the way it stayed for quite a while until someone decided it was high time to bring the button back and all the keyless convenience that came with it.

Mercedes-Benz usually gets credit for popularizing the feature with the KeylessGo system in the 1998 S-Class (I asked the company if it considered itself to be the inventor of the modern push to start system but didn’t hear back). While that car came with a somewhat standard key you could turn to start the car, you could option it out to include a keyless system that wouldn’t be out of place in a modern car. As long as you had a special plastic card on you, you could walk up to the car, get in it, and turn it on by pressing a button on the top of the gear shifter.

For a while, push to start was a luxury feature. That S-Class started at $72,515, which is around $130K in today’s money. If you remember the slew of songs in the 2010s from the likes of 2 Chainz, Rae Sremmurd, Gucci Mane, Lil Baby, and Wiz Khalifa that featured lyrics flexing about cars that don’t have keys or that started with a button, that’s why. (Khalifa references his push-button ignition in two songs).

Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

While the feature isn’t as exotic here in 2022, it’s not exactly ubiquitous yet; looking at the 2022 models of the top 10 most-sold cars in the US, only half of them come with the feature as standard. If you buy the lowest-end model of the Toyota RAV4, Camry, or Tacoma, a Honda CR-V, or a Ford F-150, you’ll be getting a traditional turning key to start it up with. (The base F-150’s exclusion of push-to-start isn’t necessarily a surprise given that the truck doesn’t even come with cruise control — yes, I’m serious.) However, by the time you’ve moved up two or three trims, all the vehicles ditch the ignition cylinder for a button.

When I got my first car with push-button start in 2020, I found it pretty confusing for the first few months (probably because I’d only ever driven decades-old cars at that point). I’d press the button a split second before the brake, eliciting annoying beeps from my car and the message “To START press brake.” I’ve grown to love it, though, and now it feels downright archaic to have to take the key out of my pocket and twist it in the ignition whenever I’m driving another car. I will admit, though, that for a month or two, I definitely tried to get out of the car (a 2016 Ford Fusion Energi) without fully turning it off, prompting it to yell at me again.

This does bring up a problem, though: as with many conveniences, push-button starts have come with a cost. Several dozen people have been killed by carbon monoxide poisoning or uncontrolled moving vehicles after they left their cars running, assuming that they would turn off after they got out with the key fob in tow. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration even has a page warning people to be extra aware if their car has a keyless ignition system. These deaths show that when a machine becomes easy enough to use without thinking, people won’t think about it — and vehicle manufacturers didn’t consider the deadly repercussions of that. In 2021, several senators proposed laws that would mandate features to prevent carbon monoxide poisoning and rollaways, but so far, the acts haven’t been passed.

Many manufacturers have started to come up with systems to prevent further deaths. But the push to start button’s days may already be numbered, thanks to companies that are pushing the convenience envelope even further. Many luxury electric vehicles — most notably Teslas — forego a manual startup process altogether. You get in, select your drive mode, and the car’s ready to whisk you away.

Image: Volvo

While plenty of EVs from more traditional automakers like Ford, Hyundai, and Toyota have push-button start, there are signs that the buttonless startup could already be trickling down; Volvo’s XC40 Recharge automatically turns itself on and off, and while Volkswagen’s ID 4 has a start / stop button, using it is completely optional according to the car’s manual. It’s more or less the same tech; the cars authenticate you via a fob, card, or even your smartphone, but they just activate or deactivate the motors when you use the gear selector, rather than making it a separate step.

As I’ve said before, I’m a bit of a sucker for ceremony, so I think it’ll be a shame if push to start is completely replaced. Thankfully, if that is the future, it could take quite a while to arrive, given how slowly buttons have spread since their resurgence. Until then, the button will continue to act as a little luxury, giving those lucky enough to have one less thing to fumble around with while getting in the car for their morning commute.

Correction May 31st, 7:02PM ET: the original version of this article incorrectly referred to carbon monoxide as CO2. Its actual chemical formula is CO. We regret the error.

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.

Photo by Mitchell Clark / The Verge

While its controls are about as simple as a Keurig’s, the Mr. Coffee does need you to do a little more than popping in a pod and pressing that button. At the very least, you’ll have to get out a paper filter, scoop in some coffee, and fill up the tank before pressing brew at some point. (Though this can be done the night before.) The Mr. Coffee’s simplicity lets you complicate the process with hand-ground coffee, reusable filters, and more if you choose to, but it doesn’t require the ritual that comes with more Instagram-friendly Moka pots, Aeropresses, and Chemexs.

While there are plenty of other coffee makers with fancier features that also turn on with a single button press, it’s hard to imagine a better version of this button than the one on my Mr. Coffee. It’s big enough that you don’t have to be precise early in the AM. It also sounds incredible, though that’s mostly thanks to the loud “click” the machine makes when it starts heating up. But because it turns on as soon as you hit the button, my brain interprets the click of the electronics as the click of the button (kind of like how newer AirPods play a sound whenever you squeeze the stem).

Photo by Mitchell Clark / The Verge

Given how good the button is, it may come as a surprise that this is not an expensive coffee maker we’re talking about. My Mr. Coffee, the five-cup model, is one of the brand’s least expensive offerings. (Note: a Mr. Coffee “cup” is not the same as the American volumetric standard of measurement — it means five ounces, meaning my machine can brew about two mugs’ worth of coffee). My Best Buy order history tells me I bought it for around $25 last year, shortly after I had started at The Verge and realized my mornings were becoming too hectic to carry out my Chemex ritual. Somehow, this coffee pot has gotten $4 cheaper since then.

While there are other coffee machines that have buttons that appear to be identical, a funny thing starts to happen when you move up to more expensive models: you run the risk of the buttons actually getting worse. I’ve seen coffee makers where the brew button is small and part of a crowded panel. Some, horrifyingly, even have touch-sensitive buttons.

I won’t judge anyone for choosing a fancier model to grace their countertop, but it’s not for me. I like that I can operate the machine responsible for getting me caffeine while I’m at 2 percent brain capacity. May the “brew now” button live up to several more years of sleepy jabs — just like the snooze button that I may or may not hit a few times before clawing my way to Mr. Coffee.

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.

To BlackBerry, buttons were the entire point of its products. When you picture a BlackBerry phone in your head, you’re not seeing an interchangeable slab. You’re seeing a full QWERTY keyboard that spans the lower third of a phone, with impossibly small keys that are somehow perfect to type on. A BlackBerry without the ubiquitous, clicky keyboard for firing off BBM messages and emails was hardly a BlackBerry at all. Even the company’s logo evokes the chiclet keys that built its brand.

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

But even the most beloved buttons can’t beat back the inexorable waves of progress: touchscreens were the future, and BlackBerry had to jump on board. As Steve Jobs commented in his now-famous 2007 iPhone introduction, phones like the BlackBerry or Palm Treo “all have these keyboards that are there whether you need them or not to be there, and they all have these control buttons that are fixed in plastic.” And as such, they’re unable to adapt to specific applications or user interfaces. It was an observation that would precede the announcement of the touchscreen-only iPhone and the beginning of the end for hardware buttons on phones.

BlackBerry got the message. And so, in 2008, the company made the Storm, its first touchscreen phone. At the time, the device had a 3.25-inch screen, much larger than its then-typical 2.5-inch screens. And it didn’t have a physical keyboard.

Instead, the Storm had a unique “SurePress” display: rather than keyboard buttons, the entire display was a gigantic button that could be clicked down like a trackpad. On an iPhone, you simply tapped away at a virtual keyboard with no real indication that you were pressing anything. On the BlackBerry Storm, you physically had to “press” each key to type, complete with an ultra-satisfying “click” sound, thanks to the mechanical switch underneath.

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

It was a great idea, in theory. In practice, the Storm was terrible to type on. (There’s a reason we use lots of little keys to type rather than one giant button.) The huge screen on the Storm was slow and had to fully lower and raise before you could press another key. The lightning-fast typing that BlackBerry power users had grown used to slowed to a glacial pace — typing out one letter at a time.

The company would try to tweak the formula on the Storm2 a year later, replacing the single mechanical switch with four piezoelectric switches at the corners of the display (making it possible to “press” multiple keys at once). It also added a full-size QWERTY keyboard in vertical orientation (where the original only offered a strange two-letter-per-key option). But even then, the SurePress technology wasn’t good enough to replicate the feeling of typing on one of BlackBerry’s normal keyboards.

BlackBerry tried to offer customers the best of both worlds when it made the Storm; instead, it managed to harness the worst qualities of both physical hardware and touchscreen typing. It resulted in a laggy, slow experience that wasn’t particularly enjoyable or easy to type on. The physical elements were louder and more fatiguing for users than a traditional QWERTY keyboard, without any of the tactile benefits of multiple hardware keys. The added friction from the physical switch detracted from any major benefits of a touchscreen for typing, too.

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

It’s no wonder that BlackBerry would abandon its SurePress technology shortly afterward: in 2010, its subsequent flagship, the BlackBerry Torch, would offer a display that was the same size as the Storm but with a traditional BlackBerry QWERTY keyboard.

BlackBerry would bounce between full touchscreen devices and its familiar hardware keyboard for years after the Storm (even offering both in many cases). But the company never tried to build a tactile touchscreen again.

Because while buttons can be a good way to use a phone — and touchscreens can be a good way to use a phone — a massive touchscreen-button hybrid turned out to be a terrible idea.