This! At a previous job we moved all our less expensive products to capacitive touch buttons and resistive touch screens because it's tremendously cheaper than physical buttons.
Cap touch buttons or physical buttons both require a circuit board, so that costs the same, but cap touch buttons just need one big sheet of material with some screen printing placed over the circuit board. Physical clicky buttons require each button to be designed, manufactured, screen printed, and the clicky action to be tuned for feel and durability, none of which is cheap. Physical buttons may not all be exactly the same size and shape due to design considerations, so that's injection mold tooling variations, additional supply chain part numbers to manage, and additional ways that manufacturing can screw up assembly. Physical buttons can jam, get stuck, or fall out, so engineering time needs to be spent ensuring this won't happen 10 years from now, too.
> At a previous job we moved all our less expensive products to capacitive touch buttons and resistive touch screens because it's tremendously cheaper than physical buttons.
I hate whoever was responsible this decision. After Internet connectivity, this is the 2nd worst trend in modern electronics.
Why is Zigbee or similar not an option there? I have a whole bunch of physical controls all around my house without running a single wire, why can't car manufacturers do the same?
Think about it a bit more. You still need wires for power, you can’t be swapping batteries in car accessories as you can in your home. If you are already running wires for power, running 1-2 more for data is not that problematic, you are already running the harness. In addition, you don’t want the latency and unreliability of wireless solutions in a car. It might be ok in your home, but not in a pretty rough environment such as your car. It would also be much more expensive both hardware and software wise, not even mentioning the potential bugs and such.
Exactly. The HW is pretty cheap but no HW is cheaper.
It has a ripple effect for other parts.
Button for everybody: More expensive and can't be sold as a package
Button optional: No Button -> Hole in plastic molded cover -> Either need different molds/parts or an additional preparation step removing the plastic covering the hole. Car manufacturing is traditionally very low margin business and extremely streamlined. Sooner or later EVs will also end up in the same situation
My parents have a 2019 Subaru Forester and it has too many buttons. It also has too many screens each with their own settings menu. Which goes to show that the battle isn’t really between buttons vs screens, but rather good UX vs bad UX.
