Dune is a small aluminum keypad — just three physical buttons — that sits next to your Mac and reads which app is in the foreground, then rebinds its keys in real time to match. Open Zoom, the keys become join, mute, and camera. Open Figma, they map to your most-used shortcuts. Switch to Slack or Notion or Claude, the bindings change again.
The pitch leans on a Harvard Business Review finding that the average knowledge worker toggles between apps around 1,200 times a day, losing roughly four hours a week just reorienting between contexts. Dune's bet is that a small, app-aware hardware layer can absorb the most repeated actions across those toggles — the three things you do every time you land in each app — and keep your hands on the keys rather than hunting through menus.
The design choice is deliberately minimal. Three buttons, not thirty. The product avoids the stream-deck category's trap of becoming a visual menu that still requires the user to look at it. Because the mapping is contextual and consistent within each app, the user's muscle memory eventually binds 'the left button' to a different action per app — the keypad becomes a modifier on the active window, not a separate surface to scan.
For anyone whose workflow spans video calls, design tools, chat, and AI clients throughout the day, the premise is that the friction of context switching is mostly a UI problem, not a cognitive one — and that a tiny piece of adaptive hardware can quietly eliminate a meaningful slice of it.