TenForward: Where Every Vulcan Knows Your Name

Somewhere along the line we lost the virtue of do one thing well. Do it right, move on, do something else right. If you need complexity plug some right things together.

Now is the time of jack of all trades, master of none, stuff it into a phone whether appropriate or not. Get the job done as cheap as possible with the same generic crap. Do you want your airplane pilot using only a touchscreen ? Why should it be different for a spaceship, a car, an audio engineer ?

A steering wheel, once learned, is a wonderfully flexible interface that meshes with human intuition, throw rock left, rock go left, we have brain circuits devoted to this stuff, it works. Tactile interfaces can and should speak to our evolutionary core. Let's take a step back, economic imperative be damned.

Partially probably yes. However, there's also the issue of dealing with dynamic information. If you just need volume and AC controls, use physical buttons please. If you need GPS, media library controls, phone controls, texting, etc, which you don't need at the same time, they can all use one screen, and that screen can have dynamic controls. A touch screen makes a whole lot of sense for that.

I love physical controls. There are some things that should never be replaced by touch controls. There are places where touch controls make sense though. Anyone who doesn't realize this is choosing to be ignorant.

Phone are getting bigger though, wish they were smaller again.

Cheaper to ship.

I agree. I want heft.

Exactly. It's the same reason they're being forced into new cars despite the fact that an awful lot of people don't like them

It’s just cheaper to have a one screen that can be configured with a code change to do everything rather than physical buttons that need a full hardware change to do something else.

....you can remap your buttons to do other things....