If we pray hard enough at this Philips shrine, maybe TV remotes will suck less

It was surely not Philips' intent, but this wall of remote controls is the perfect encapsulation of everything that's wrong with the experience of watching TV. Most of these remotes are ergonomically questionable, all of them have more buttons than necessary, and each is just different enough from the other to make switching between TVs feel unintuitive and irritating. Observe as the Mute button dashes from the top, to the middle, and then even to the bottom of some sets, depending on the cable or TV supplier's specifications. Or how about the awesome way in which the US standard for the RGBY buttons is completely at odds with the Brazilian one?

The wild thing is that all of these cumbersome input devices are made by a single company: this is Philips Home Control's wall of pride, not shame. I don't expect the TV remote control to evolve at the same pace as the smartphone, but some evolution over the past two decades would have been nice. And no, putting a dedicated Netflix button on the thing doesn't count.