The New PS4 Finally Gives Us The One Feature I've Been Waiting For

Sony has announced a slight redesign of the PS4, and while it’s definitely more of an iteration on the current SKU than anything resembling the next generation of this hardware, there are some important tweaks. It will be a little bit lighter and a little bit more energy efficient, with a more matte finish and a smaller LED indicator. All good changes, of course, but they pale in comparison to the most important one I could imagine coming to this current piece of hardware. It might seem like a small point, but for me it’s always been the most glaringly wrong thing with the otherwise beautifully designed PS4. I’m talking about buttons.

For some reason that I’ll never quite be able to figure out, both the Xbox One and the PS4 decided that it was 2013, dammit, and buttons were a thing of the past. I can just imagine some executive standing before a nondescript conference room table, proudly laser-pointing at a PowerPoint slide with an uncomfortably detailed picture of a thumb awkwardly pressed against a nondescript part of the console. With words like “digital,” “touch-sensitive,” and “disruptive” bulleted along the frame, the executives nod in appreciation, doing whatever they can to prolong the meeting and avoid returning home.

And so we got two consoles without mechanical buttons, forcing you to just sort of touch a certain part of the console with no feedback on whether or not you’ve actually touched it properly. The Xbox One’s fake buttons are a little bit better: it’s fairly clear where they are, and they at least correspond to where you’d imagine a real button should be. The PS4′s are a total mess. There are two identical buttons for “eject” and “power,” too close to ever remember which is which, too small to adequately “press,” and weirdly unreliable. Again, the rest of the system is so well made that the lack of actual buttons became a total mystery. What on Earth was wrong with buttons? Even the iPhone has buttons.

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Luckily, the world is coming to its senses. The CUH-1200 line of PS4s will feature mechanical buttons, the kind you can actually press. Hopefully the Xbox One will follow, and we can all forget the slightly embarrassing moment when the video game industry decided that buttons were no longer cool. Let’s hope the Xbox One follows suit and we can put this all behind us.