Dan Wilson’s Blog

Why do devices still have a stop button? The nuances between the stop and pause button are long gone and irrelevent. When you think about, it is only needed when the device is playing a tape, and only because there was so much going on mechanically. Tapes are gone. Dead.

I don’t see its relevency for optical media anymore. If you want the disc to stop spinning, you would just turn off the whole device. One could make the argument that for portable, battery powered DVD players, a stop button is good for saving battery life. I would argue these devices should have enough built in flash memory that all pauses should be able to spin down and spin back up the disc without disrupting the video.

Which brings us to the present-day and not-to-distant future of flash-based and downloadable and streaming content. Here there is no discernible difference between pause and stop. Unless stop returns the content back to a starting position upon playing again. Which would just piss people off. Think audio books.

So, in conclusion, do not buy any device that has a stop button. They didn’t think seriously about design, they just remembered what buttons their old VCRs had.