The Capacitive Button Cult Must Be Stopped

In an essay titled "The Capacitive Button Cult Must Be Stopped", Jon Bell writes:

A capacitive button has no place on a phone, and the people who are pushing it into the marketplace are over-fetishizing visual design to the detriment of the overall experience.

I completely agree. I complained about this when I wrote about the Samsung Omnia 7:

The capacitive buttons are a really, really bad idea. Seriously, I thought we had all agreed not to do that around 2003. It’s such an obviously bad idea that it’s hard to imagine how it found its way into the final product. Did they never play a game in landscape mode, and accidentally back out of the whole game by merely holding the device wrong?

But it's not just a problem on phones. My stove has touch buttons,¹ which means it starts beeping (and sometimes even activates the "child safety function", which essentially makes it impossible to operate the stove at all) whenever something brushes against the buttons. This happens frequently, because it's easy to place a pan or a piece of fruit or even just a spoon so it accidentally touches one of the buttons.

I think phones have capacitive buttons for the same reason laptops have reflective screens, and TVs in stores have their brightness and contrast turned all the way up. It looks really cool when you see it in a store, and you don't notice how screwed up it really is until after you've already bought it.²