> I wonder if Apple iPhone will meet with the same success, as its touchscreen offers no tactile feedback. Will people get tired of having to look down every time they dial a number?
Look at musical instruments, particularly synthesizers.
This world went from menu-diving and screens to a full-blown knobfest (for digitally-controlled equipment, mind you).
Specifically, no gear has ever not had the volume knob/slider; but now, there's a knob for everything else.
Also go figure, my $200 Sonicware digital synth made in 2021 can have 15 reliable, precise knobs that will last decades, as well as analog and digital I/O on the front panel, but my $20,000 car can't have either because of cost savings/reliability? Please.
And my Fostex 4-track recorder from 1995 has 24 knobs and 5 sliders, perfectly functioning, and if you think that musicians are gentle on their gear, you haven't seen many musicians.
Knobs and sliders on my Korg, Casio, and Yamaha digital synths from the mid-1980s work well too, never a problem with them.
Let's not pretend that lack of knobs is anything but a UX/aesthetics choice — and for cars, a particularly awful one.
But I agree that I think it's probably largely a UX/aesthetics choice. Low cost touch screens are usually pretty terrible at handling varying climate conditions, especially compared to some decent knobs/encoders. I'm hoping once the manufacturers are done broadcasting how "modern" their interfaces are, that they'll start adding knobs back in for the common operations (volume, climate control, etc)
I also wonder if the fear stemmed from back when knobs and buttons required extra wiring instead of using buses like most cars do now.
Yeah, you wish. Have you ever been to a music studio, or a live show? You'd be lucky if nobody spills beer on your gear :)
Dust, gunk, smoke, humidity, and temperature are usually way worse than in the interior of a car.
Not to mention, I've never had an issue with knobs in any of my cars (particularly, the 2000 Honda Civic that I drove until 2017, or the 2010 Honda Fit that I'm driving now, or my partner's Toyota's from the same years).
Knobs breaking down is a hypothetical problem. The knobs are fine.
>I also wonder if the fear stemmed from back when knobs and buttons required extra wiring instead of using buses like most cars do now.
The fear comes from the need to sell "modern"-looking interfaces. If the new car looks like the old one, why buy it? Yet another good UX killed in the name of marketing.
Again, synthesizers went through the same cycle: knobs -> buttons and menus -> touch screens -> KNOBS. There was never a good reason to not have any knobs, especially on high-end gear. It was all about style.
Haha touche. You're right, the amount of alcohol I've seen in my friends' synths when performing is uh not the way I treat my keyboards or synths that stay home lol.
> The fear comes from the need to sell "modern"-looking interfaces. If the new car looks like the old one, why buy it?
Agreed. I hope they snap out of their collective delusion sooner rather than later. In the meantime, I wonder if you can make your own knobby panel that interfaces with Android Auto to paper over the crappy UX of flat surfaces.
But the smartphone does so many other things, I put up with it.
That doesn't mean to say i wouldn't greatly welcome a smartphone with a dial on the edge, or a touchscreen with tactile feedback. But due to lack of imagination of designers, technical impossibility, or economic cost (i don't know which...) there's no such thing on the market.
Don’t get me started on text selection on iThings.
I'm thinking of music keyboard workstations and stage keyboards. The products from Nord have swept the stage keyboard market because of their one-knob-per-function design, allowing for quick mid-song adjustments with no menu diving.
People greatly favor knob-per-function and minimal menu diving. Having some kind of screen and minimal menus for rarely used features is fine, too, but anything that’s about playability and something you want to tweak in real time needs a knob or slider interface.
Yeah, not all of them but compare a DX7 to a Montage 7.
The DX has 2 sliders and 2 wheels, and a bunch of membrane buttons.
The Montage has 2 wheels and something like 10 sliders and knobs, ignoring the general-purpose knob and selector wheel next to the display, plus a ton of specialised physical buttons.
I could text while shifting but it wasn’t till touchscreens that everyone decided laws needed to be passed.
I miss k9. There were somehow fewer typos.
T9? Or was there a K9 as well?
Actually very useful when looking at a phone number, and a great deal faster
It's the same justification for keeping radio and climate controls, as well as needed safety buttons like hazard lights, as physically actuated. It is much easier and safer than having to look at an ever-changing panel.
Imagine if your climate control knobs moved around your center console by several inches every time you used them. Was that fan control, or temperature?
I can almost blind type on a touch screen with both thumbs, too. However, it’s no where near as good as I was with hard buttons and Motorola’s particular dialect of T9. Towards the end, Motorola tried to get clever and start reordering the words based on MRU and it played havoc with my muscle memory.
I can still dial on an analog button phone faster than I can look up and dial a person on my iPhone, and I haven't done the former in 20-some years. Muscle memory is quite powerful.
Walk around the city with phone in pocket. Need to call one of them: pick phone from pocket (without looking), thumb-flick the screen open (without looking), thumb-press the person's speed dial number (without looking), done.
or
Walk around the city with phone in pocket. Phone vibrates. pick phone from pocket (without looking), glance at front screen for 1/3 sec to see who it was. If wanted to take the call, thumb-flick the screen open (without looking) while raising phone to ear (without looking), done. If not, toss phone back in pocket.
There was also the cost-of-phone factor. The thing was so cheap, I treated it like there was an old crumpled piece of paper in my pocket, never worried if it would get scratched or if the screen would crack. The constant worry when my smarphone falls on the floor sucks. I never had a better phone experience than with my flip-phone. Sadly, recently Whatsapp became so ubiquitous here, that people stopped calling and only texted, and eventually I had to upgrade.