Dane Trethowan writes:
> of a rubber membrane type so yep, they will wear out very quickly indeed!
> I wonder when manufacturers will stop using this rubbish.
They'll stop when somebody comes out with something better and
cheaper. That's what drives technology advancement. Nobody
deliberately builds cheap rubbish, but the business of
manufacturing is cut-throat and the game is to build your gadget
cheaper than anybody else can make theirs. We could make things
with modular buttons that you could pop out and replace when one
went bad, but that might double the price of the device in
question and many people just look at the price tag and don't
really care so the beautiful calculator or sound recorder with
the user-replaceable buttons doesn't sell while the one that is
barely holding together and half as much sells like hot cakes.
Traditional buttons are hard to keep going because they
contain moving parts and springs or rubber pads and these things
wear out. A lot of times now, a button is a piece of rubber with
metallic paint on the bottom or maybe foam plastic impregnated
with carbon to make it conductive. Under that is the circuit
board with a couple of conductive traces sitting under the
button so that they bridge or short together when you push the
rubber down against the circuit board pads. That's about as
cheap as it gets and any rough treatment or deterioration over
time will make it fail.
The iphone and other touch screen devices are the next
wave of technology because the buttons have no moving parts. You
just change the value of a capacitor when your finger presses
against the screen and those should last a very long time.
I've even seen buttons that have a light source in them
and a photo cell and work when the button is pressed such that
it blocks the light between the source and the detector. Those
buttons should last as many years as the spring and other
mechanical parts last, but they probably cost twenty times what
one of those rubber buttons does.
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