Touchscreens in cars are cancer.

I can click a knob in the dark without taking my eyes off the road.

There’s no tactile feedback to know what I clicked on a screen two pages deep when I need to turn on the defroster.

I had completely forgotten about how mad I was about them removing the physical page turning button from the kindle and now i am fucking pissed off again over something that happened years ago and I shouldn't care about but I fucking do.

take it away then sell it back as a blessing, what scrubs are in charge of designing and releasing these things

Technological progress has halted in a lot of areas. It's not just minimalist design in phones. Lots of other things remove features, advertise it as a new feature, then add the feature back. Sometimes they charge for it.

For phones all touch screen is smart as it can be upgraded with software only. Cars etc it’s retarded.

They track your every movement and record all of your conversations and archive your messages and emails.

I can't wait for phones with nice screens and a sliding physical keyboard inevitably come back out. My old Motorola Droid 4 was awesome.

It's because they don't have anything new to sell customers. So they just remove shit and re-add it later.

Ever notice how the "smartphone" has remained virtually unchanged since the first iPhone (2004)? Only thing "new" is faster hardware, nicer cameras, bullshit AI "assistants", and other useless gimmicks.

Selling people tech today is more about programming them to forget, rather than innovating new technology.

edit: also notice how all the new changes they make are cheaper to produce? touchscreens are 10x cheaper than designing physical buttons

The entire system operates like this with multiple examples.. The original paper bag gets replaced by plastic to 'save the rainforests'. Plastic bag gets replaced by paper bags to 'save the planet'

Food is originally commercially grown organic, then grown with chemical pesticides etc to increase yield and consumer choice and told it's just as good if not better than previous crops. Food is grown again without pesticides etc and charged a premium as 'Organic'.

Product design and customer usability are two disciplines that hardly speak to each other, if only within a marketing aspect. In other words, its like engineering something and actually putting it to use in the real world - in the wild - and how it gets adapted and ultimately used and how it breaks down unexpectedly.

There's a story of a washing machine company off in Singapore or some shit that sold a particular model way above expectations in some back-county area that hardly even had paved roads, so they went to investigate. Turns out the locals were using this model of clothes washer to wash root vegetables en mass to make their life easier. So they took this and added more rigidity and an actual 'vegetable cycle' to the thing and then made more sales, happy customers, etc..

Not many companies do this, and when they try, it isn't usually too successful since people are typically retarded. I think Ford said something like "if I had listened to my customers, I would have added a second horse" when asked about input on the automobile he made. I know that customer feedback for early iProducts were very negative since people hated having a touchscreen that got smudgy and greasy, hard to see, unusable, etc. They went with it anyways.