Bad example.

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.

Presumably your car will be in places with more demanding climate conditions than your knob-filled synth. And areas of high humidity or with lots of dust/gunk are the places that break down knobs the most.

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.

>Presumably your car will be in places with more demanding climate conditions than your knob-filled synth. And areas of high humidity or with lots of dust/gunk are the places that break down knobs the most.

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.

> 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 :)

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.

I hate the keyboard on my phone. For dialing a number, it's awful. Give me an old phone any day!

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.

I can accept the touchscreen for its broad utility, but poor UI is intolerable. Like how Android keeps covering up the dial pad button in the phone app with inane messages about duplicate contacts. When I want to dial a phone number, sometimes I need to do it “right now”, and I don’t care about duplicate contacts or whatever stupid thing it wants to nag me about. Put that shit in my notifications so I can deal with it in my own time, or just swipe it away.

Don’t get me started on text selection on iThings.

Yes, yes, and yes. The android phone app is a case study in ergonomics failure. It boggles the mind and clearly shows how smartphones are not phones anymore but pocket browsers.

Knobs have already come back in some contexts.

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.

I was going to make the same point, more generally about electronic music gear.

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.

Were knobs ever gone in this context though?

> Were knobs ever gone in this context though?

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 don't see why not. Typing on Android has been an unceasing exercise in frustration ever since the real Swype and HTC keyboards went defunct. I made 5 typing errors while writing this message alone.

SwiftKey is good. It also has the nice feature in that it lets you raise the keyboard higher which is great for large devices so that you are not typing at the very bottom in an unbalanced manner.

Really? I can type exceptionally quickly and actually using the android swipe typing. At least as good as the original Swype. Sure it's not as fast as a physical keyboard, but I'm not writing a novel on this device. (3 typos made writing this)

Is that "actually" supposed to be "accurately"? Kind of undermines your point, doesn't it?

It does! C'est la vie, it's good enough for me!

Datedness of that speculation aside, was dialing numbers without looking at the keypad something people did a lot? Busy Wall Street types maybe?

I could T9 an SMS message while holding eye contact with a person. Right down to knowing certain words were “press buttons, down twice”.

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.

99.5% of the time I only call my wife, my parents, my sisters, and my four best friends. That's 9 people. With my so much missed flip-phone I could do this, check it out:

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.

I'm blind and I could call people whose numbers I know even on a dumb phone with no accessibility. At the moment, some strange failure of the phone screen reader, accidental switch off of volume or whatever and it is game over. Try to restart by the hardware keys and pray that you are not left with a thousand dollar brick in the middle of a trans-continental trip. Real story with my first touch phone with the only difference that at the time I didn't know the hardware keys to restart the brick.

I could do it while driving. It was much easier to do than you would imagine. The keypad only had 9 keys and if you would put the base of your thumb lightly on the 2 key you could reach the whole keypad without issue. Just about everyone learned to do this without trying. People who had predictive text like T9 had to work at it a little, but it was like riding a bicycle.

Sorry I meant the tip of the thumb on the 2 key. Telephone keypads are inverted. Also the sometimes keys would have a raised bump in the middle key like the 5 key so you type blind.

Texting while driving was safe! Kind of. You could sense what key you were touching and how many times you touched it. "ha" would be "442" - two presses to get to H, one press for A. "lol" was 555666555. Still safer than Swype and looking down to see the several autocorrect options it gives you, or wondering if your grip was proper for your usual thumb motion. Even if you don't like the reference to driving, this was still convenient. Go watch "The Departed" from 2006 and see how Leo's character types in his pocket.

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?

Yes, touch typing is a thing, for many people who aren't "[b]usy Wall Street types".

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.

Yeah. You could basically rest your fingers on a keypad like home keys and dial blind.

Actually very useful when looking at a phone number, and a great deal faster

Typing SMSes in school and college was easy with a classic keypad, and the error rates were very low... now even with watching the screen I make more mistakes than then.

On my BlackBerry, I could set the keys to dial individual phone numbers with a single long press. The FJ bumps made it easy to do without looking. I sure miss that.

More than numbers. We would write text messages without looking at the keypad. This required a lot more key presses than a number.

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.

> I miss k9

T9? Or was there a K9 as well?

I could text and drive without ever taking my eyes off the road. Probably still not the safest, but I constantly see people staring down into their lap while driving now.

My friend in college broke his phone's screen. But he kept using it for about a year without problems. He had every phone number memorised and could type messages without needing to look at the keyboard or the screen. You would be talking to him face to face and he could be typing out a message with his phone in his hand, inside his pocket.

it was something literally every teenager and adult did. anybody who'd been using a phone for more than a year.