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Comment by sneak | Hacker News Reader

I can only conclude from the situation you describe, as well as the fact that most cameras (as cameras, not phones) still lack GPS and sometimes Wi-Fi, that a great many industrial designers are trend-following, uncreative bores.

Most modern car interior controls are horrible (Tesla’s giant laggy touchscreen included).

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Laggy? The Tesla Model 3 touchscreen is anything but.

I had many reservations about the touchscreen prior to ownership, however I don't really have any complaints now. You get used to it, Tesla's specifically is not laggy, and most critical stuff is on the steering wheel/stalk anyway.

Maybe this has been improved in the Model 3, but in older models: https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/how-laggy-is-your-to...

> a great many industrial designers are trend-following, uncreative bores.

More likely that the executives above them who are watching what sells and what doesn't are.

> Tesla’s giant laggy touchscreen included

This is false, full stop.

Why do I need my camera to have GPS? In what situation would I be equipped with a camera and not my phone, which certainly has a GPS? This seems like the same instinct that makes OEMs put mobile modems in laptops, as if I would ever have my laptop but not my phone to which to tether it.

EXIF tagging.

Because you would want your photos to be geotagged.

Also, whenever you are starting a sentence such as "In what circumstance..." and making blanket assertions, it's better to take a step back and question if other people's circumstances are radically different from yours. That's what good product thinking is about.

GPS in the camera is handy for auto-tagging the location of the photos. Which is nice for when on trips.

Thanks. I am familiar with why you want location data in photos. I am not familiar with any justification for why this data cannot be acquired from my mobile.

If I'm using a standalone camera, I don't want to be fiddling with other devices just to get geotagging working.

It possibly could be done in real-time using Bluetooth but I doubt it would be reliable and remember that higher end cameras might be writing out images at maybe 6+ frames/second. Alternatively you can make a point of recording a track on your phone (which tends to be hard on the battery life) and then syncing them up later. But, as someone who has done this, it's a pain in the neck.

Geotagging on my X-T3 with the Camera remote Android app is very reliable to be honest. And you don't have to query the phone at the same rate as you're taking pictures, it's perfectly sane to assume the same location for 5-10 seconds during a burst.

Fair enough. Though I'm not sure I'm convinced that, today, you're not just better off putting a GPS receiver in the camera. GPS is a bit hard on battery life but with the bigger batteries in these cameras, I'm not sure that's much of an issue. (And of course you can turn it off.)

Depends. MILCs are generally pretty hard on battery and keeping a constant GPS lock would exacerbate their generally poor "active standby" (camera turned on with the viewfinder or LCD active) battery life. On the other hand, my smartphone, using both GPS and augmented network location services can instead very quickly acquire a lock when needed with minimal battery usage only when needed. And it also has a way larger battery, and the system is generally more optimized.

Not everyone carries a phone, let alone a smartphone.

Not everyone wants to.

Geotagging pictures is a very important use case for a professional photographer, and relying on the user to provide GPS through another device is not advisable.

Also phone location services may not work very well without a cell signal, and not everyone takes photos only within range of a cell tower.

> This seems like the same instinct that makes OEMs put mobile modems in laptops, as if I would ever have my laptop but not my phone to which to tether it.

A cellular radio in a laptop gets access to better antennas and a vastly larger battery than what's found in a smartphone.

The combination of the batteries in my phone and my laptop is clearly more capacious than the battery in the laptop alone.

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