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Comment by andirk | Hacker News Reader

Let's return to the button where possible. I often prefer physical buttons due to the feedback I get. I know it does nothing, but I'll still press extra hard on a stupid touchscreen if it's not responding.

On how touchscreens are over-used for the sake of updating without physical constraints. "The software guys can independently do the design of the UI, changing things down to the very last moment, or even after the last moment if the car can be updated." [1] [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32494497

On making light of people born post-1990s how no one can fix anything now. "We care less about repair as most would rather just scrap that broken TV and get a new one. The electronic and small appliance repair store are all but gone" [2] [2] https://qr.ae/pv5PjI

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> On making light of people born post-1990s how no one can fix anything now. "We care less about repair as most would rather just scrap that broken TV and get a new one. The electronic and small appliance repair store are all but gone"

Very few people have ever been capable of fixing things, especially electronics. As electronics got smaller, more integrated and more complicated the bar got higher, reducing the pool of capable people even more.

The other problem is that TVs have gotten cheaper at the same time labor prices have gone up. This drove all the TV repair shops out of business because the bench time alone to even do a quick diagnosis is already starting to approach the cost of a new TV. Spending hundreds of dollars to (maybe) repair your 5+ year old TV just doesn't really make a ton of sense to most people. And that's assuming there's not a major fault: replacing a few capacitors is one thing; replacing the mainboard or LCD panel can cost more than buying a new TV.

This same pattern repeats for most consumer electronics, sadly.

What we really need is more standardized swappable modules.

The odds of me replacing a BGA chip are low. By the time one fails, the device may be obsolete, the part may be expensive, my soldering skills probably could never be as good as a robot, etc.

But if my computer has an issue, I can totally replace a bad drive in full confidence that it's probably worth it.

The fact that there's no standards body for modular consumer goods really sucks.

>On how touchscreens are over-used for the sake of updating without physical constraints. "The software guys can independently do the design of the UI, changing things down to the very last moment, or even after the last moment if the car can be updated."

Or just changing the underlying software. Especially insidious things like inserting new functionality that the user never wanted. Like clicking on the text entry part of a chatbox and instead of getting a blinking cursor to begin typing, getting a User agreement dialog and an "I accept button". Utterly infuriating change.

> Let's return to the button where possible. I often prefer physical buttons due to the feedback I get. I know it does nothing, but I'll still press extra hard on a stupid touchscreen if it's not responding.

Unless, of course, your phone is one of the few where pushing harder will make it perform a different action, if used in the right place (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Force_Touch).

> On how touchscreens are over-used for the sake of updating without physical constraints. "The software guys can independently do the design of the UI, changing things down to the very last moment, or even after the last moment if the car can be updated." [1] [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32494497

This is akin to frontend developers doing everything in their power to make their development environment the most comfortable, while sacrificing end-user performance/bandwidth/usability for getting it.

Force Touch was discontinued in 2019 and replaced with a simple “long press” feature called Haptic Touch. iPhone 11 and later and Apple Watch 6 and onwards don’t have the pressure sensitive layer anymore.

MacBook touchpads still have it though.

And yet the (defectively) giant trackpads don't support the Apple Pencil, which would have been great.

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