In today’s digital age, it sometimes feels like hardware has taken a back seat to the software that drives our devices. Button of the Month is a monthly look at what some of those buttons and switches are like on devices old and new, and it aims to appreciate how we interact with our devices on a physical, tactile level.
Smart home devices can make people uneasy, what with the “constantly listening to you” and the massive breach of privacy whereby paid human contractors turned out to be listening to recordings from Apple, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Facebook services without users knowing it. But I still use a Google Home Mini, and part of that is because of the physical microphone mute switch on the back that gives a kind of peace of…