Hacker News Reader

Comment by phlhr | Hacker News Reader

Same could have been said for smartphone physical keyboard yet here we are.

Touch screen is a better interface because the UI can adapt to the context. I get that when you are driving you don’t want to have to look at the screen but honestly the benefits far outweigh the perceived cons.

View on HN

No, the same couldn't be said about smartphone keyboards. The space in a smartphone is at an extreme premium and having the ability to display a keyboard or something else is very valuable. In a car this problem doesn't exist - you can have a touchscreen AND a normal glovebox latch. Removing the glovebox latch and replacing it with a touchscreen is nothing but idiocy, with zero benefits for anyone, ever, at any point.

> Same could have been said for smartphone physical keyboard yet here we are.

Yep that's why everyone is using 6" touchscreen keyboards on laptops and desktop PCs - oh wait, they aren't because there is plenty of space for physical buttons that work better.

> Touch screen is a better interface because the UI can adapt to the context. I get that when you are driving you don’t want to have to look at the screen but honestly the benefits far outweigh the perceived cons.

When people are too stupid to recognise satire, you get tremendous support for stupid things.

https://www.theonion.com/apple-introduces-revolutionary-new-...

It's not "perceived cons" - it causes accidents. It is distracting.

In 1930, laws were proposed in Massachusetts and St. Louis to ban radios while driving. According to automotive historian Michael Lamm, “Opponents of car radios argued that they distracted drivers and caused accidents, that tuning them took a driver’s attention away from the road, and that music could lull a driver to sleep.”

https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/29631/when-car-radio-was...

I am not sure what your point is here?

It's true but the physical buttons on my car radio let me get things over with very quickly.

The more complicated and sophisticated you make the UI, the worse it is while driving. A touch screen invites excessive complexity the same way enterprise java invited excessive complexity.

It has caused accidents, yes.

Nope. I bought phones with physical keyboards for as long as I could, because they work better for me. But I'm not in the majority, and manufacturers didn't want to keep selling phones with moving parts, so here we are.

And no way does a touch screen have benefits that outweigh the benefits of dedicated tactile controls for the driver.

> Same could have been said for smartphone physical keyboard yet here we are.

The safety aspects are quite different. It is mildly annoying not to be able to touch type text messages; it is deadly to have to fiddle with a touch screen for a car’s basic functionality.

>but honestly the benefits far outweigh the perceived cons.

how?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com