Because putting a damned capacitice touchscreen is cheaper than even one good button.
I spent non-trivial amount of time to find devices that have tactile, physical interfaces. I certainly paid a premium in all cases. Because putting a capacitive layer and an LCD is god damn cheaper, for the reasons you describe.
It's not that the screens are better, or even good. It's that they are so versatile that they are the cheapest, lowest common denominator option for interaction design.
In a sense, Star Trek predicted this, as at least part of the reasoning behind flat panel touchscreens everywhere was that it was very, very cheap prop to make compared to complex physical controls.
The touchscreen is the natural evolution of unending drop down menus that require several trips through every time you do some operation, because the application development had no time for UX research.
This just isn't right. It's not the cheapness, by far. The iPhone didn't revolutionize the world because it's cheaper - it did in spite of it.
It revolutionized the world because a big screen means:
- More content you can view at once
- More flexible and powerful apps that can have more, more intuitive controls and display more information
- Touching an app directly and interacting with it directly means you can manipulate apps far more intuitively, quickly, with direct feedback (remember scrolling webpages before touch with tiny ball wheels or up/down arrows? yea, it sucks)
Resistive touch screen sucked, but capacitive were more expensive and were the game changer. I think you have it backwards.
Except I'm not talking about tablet/slabphone form, but talking generally.
iPhone was operating in a market where touchscreens were already the norm, it just had a better touchscreen.
It was a general lowering of costs, coupled with better networks and the ability to use more modern web pages that truly revolutionized the market. Capacitive touchscreens were nice, but not end-all.
In fact, my first experience with iPhone 3G was that it was clunkier than the smartphones we used. (and definitely felt cheap).
At least some phones, for a time, used to integrate both touch screen and buttons, which had significant benefits when it came to UX (as buttons can be navigated by tactile feedback only)
iPhone "revolutionized" the world[0] because it gave people a portable computer that combined multiple separate devices into one, with (added retroactively) possibility for extending it with further capabilities.
This justifies a smartphone in its current form. It does not justify why your car stereo is operated by a touch screen.
The truth to p_l's comment is plainly evident if you look at household appliances of today. You'll note that ovens and washing machines don't even have touch screens. They have touch panels with fixed image underneath (same with pre-CGI Star Trek interfaces). They're an UX nightmare, but are used precisely because capacitive touch detection is very cheap (doubly so at low fidelity required in these cases) - it's just a plastic/metal sandwich with zero moving parts.
--
[0] - iPhone is the one that's most remembered, but not the only phone in that space in its era.
A big problem is that you don't really choose a car based on whether it has touchscreen or not. And then there's the aspect of "distracted by the shiny" which has to be tempered by having experience with touchscreens
Because putting a damned capacitice touchscreen is cheaper than even one good button.
I spent non-trivial amount of time to find devices that have tactile, physical interfaces. I certainly paid a premium in all cases. Because putting a capacitive layer and an LCD is god damn cheaper, for the reasons you describe.
It's not that the screens are better, or even good. It's that they are so versatile that they are the cheapest, lowest common denominator option for interaction design.
In a sense, Star Trek predicted this, as at least part of the reasoning behind flat panel touchscreens everywhere was that it was very, very cheap prop to make compared to complex physical controls.
The touchscreen is the natural evolution of unending drop down menus that require several trips through every time you do some operation, because the application development had no time for UX research.