[mrtksn]

The cars with a lot of buttons simply look outdated and people feel bad on choosing a car with a small screen.

The whole marketing is built on it, you get a small screen and lots of buttons if you get the basic version of the car and you get giant touchscreen if you buy the premium package.

If your new car has a large touchscreen your friends who own 5+ y.o. car compliment your choice and express jealousy(at the time of purchase, most people don't have real world experience with touch screens on cars and touch screens are in these cutting edge electronics that are expensive, so they must be good). If your new car has a small screen you need to explain why this was the logical choice and how much you saved.

It's even the same with the iPhone 13 mini. That device is amazing, you can use it with one hand and fits in every pocket and the screen is actually larger than the first large screen iPhone(the iPhone 6) but people will try to understand why you bought that one. Are you poor? Why would you buy a tiny phone?

It's very strange, the word on the street is that the larger the screen the better. If your $30K product instantly becomes much easier to sell when you replace buttons with touchscreens without increasing the costs wouldn't you do that? I guess you need to have a niche, snobby traditionalist brand to be able to reject that demand from the consumers.

[badpun]

> people will try to understand why you bought that one. Are you poor? Why would you buy a tiny phone?

I mean, fsck them. If I had people in my life who though like that (I don't), I'd get rid of them. If they're family and cannot be simply cut off, I'd minimise the contact.

[pc86]

The only thing sillier than judging people based on the size of their phone is cutting them off or "minimizing contact" rather than just explaining to them why they're wrong and moving on.

[badpun]

Have fun explaining to someone why the foundations of their life philosopy are wrong/stupid/harmful.

I much prefer to just stick to like-minded people and not try to be friends with people where our fundamentals are completely at odds.

[duncan-donuts]

Heh funny you mentioned the iPhone 13 mini. I just got a new phone and picked the iPhone mini. It’s by far my favorite phone since the iPhone 5. It’s also one of the cheapest new iPhones you can get. Like buttons on a dashboard the iPhone 13 mini is far and away a better product (for me).

[mrtksn]

And sells poorly, you can have hard time finding accessories for it because it sells poorly. Unfortunately, according to the leaks so far, it appears that there won't be iPhone 14 mini.

[JustSomeNobody]

> sells poorly...

Relative to other iPhones, yes. I read that it accounts for 3% of iphone 13 (Pro, Pro Max, mini, standard) sales. The 13 line itself accounts for about 75% of sales. If Apple sold 40M phones per quarter, that 120M of the 13 line, so 3.6M of the 13 Mini. At 699, that's a 2.5BN business. Not too shabby.

[thesuitonym]

Bogus. I love my 12 mini. First phone I've been excited about since the Blackberry Priv.

[RHSeeger]

> you need to explain why

You really don't, and the fact that people consider it a given that you do says some very bad things about society. You should be buying the things that work the best for _you_, not the ones that will impress your friends.

[jbverschoor]

Sure, my laptop looks outdated with a keyboard. But compared to touch screen I'm more productive, faster, make less mistake, can wear gloves, don't have to look, can use it in sunlight, and it was never unresponsive.

[Silhouette]

If your new car has a large touchscreen your friends who own 5+ y.o. car compliment your choice and express jealousy

Does this ever happen? I've never heard anyone express jealousy regarding not having a big enough touchscreen in their car. I've heard several owners of modern cars with touchscreens bemoan how complicated and slow to use they are. In my experience literally no-one who actually buys and drives cars thinks they are a good idea and many people - including myself - are deterred from buying a new model specifically because of the technology.

[mrtksn]

It definitely happens(I know from experience).

The thing is, it's actually really hard to judge quality of a design(takes a bachelor degree in Industrial Design and masters in related field and a few studies like the one in question to objectively evaluate a design). Most people like the new trendy one and unfortunately in cars that's a large touchscreen.

Don't think of car enthusiast, think people who like the car because of the shade of its color and feel of the leather - which is most people.

[salawat]

>The thing is, it's actually really hard to judge quality of a design(takes a bachelor degree in Industrial Design and masters in related field and a few studies like the one in question to objectively evaluate a design).

Horse hockey. Spend a couple years in Quality Assurance with your eyes open. It:s trivial to seperate wheat from chaff. The key that your Industrial Design might give you insight on is the fact that Industry has decided unilaterally that cost to produce > joy of end user in use. I.e. if it's cheaper to make and sell, it's higher Quality, rather than it's damn good, now lets streamline it.

Yes, your process weighs into it, but I assure you, the cognitive load of a haptic interface vs a touchscreen is so much lower it's absurd to even try to compare. If you really care about the end user, you take the time to get them buttons, and don't distract them with touchscreen finicky BS.

[Silhouette]

Don't think of car enthusiast, think people who like the car because of the shade of its color and feel of the leather - which is most people.

Those are exactly the people I'm talking about though. I'm in the UK - maybe the current culture is different here to some other places?

Of course it's also possible that my own experience hasn't been representative but I've heard the same story so many times for so long now that it's hard to believe I've encountered some freak sample of outliers.

[mrtksn]

I don't know for sure but on most brands you literally have to pay more to get the large touchscreen. Don't you think that the car manufacturers would put desirable features to convince the customer for an upsell?

[parrellel]

Put in cheap features and then try to make them desirable definitely seems to be closer to the reality. Bonus sized cheap features definitely goes into that.

Also, chalk me up as someone who has never heard a positive thing about car touch screens after a week or so of interaction.

[vwcx]

> Don't think of car enthusiast, think people who like the car because of the shade of its color and feel of the leather - which is most people.

Precisely. Millions of people (intelligent, rational, highly-educated) still buy cars with specific color/trim as their primary motivator. Until the trend reverses, a screen will continue to be a value-add to any vehicle because of the "modern" association.

[datavirtue]

I started buying base versions of cars to get away from the trend of shoddy touchscreens with bad software. Even if everything is done perfectly I get lost in them...which is not a safe feeling.

Honda has features they implemented in some attempt to streamline the experience but you still get lost easily.

After having a few vehicles with large touchscreens and then buying an F-150 XL to simplify, I can't even describe the elated feeling of operating a vehicle where the screen does what it's supposed to do with the vital controls all being physical. Yeah, I look like peasant but I get to keep my sanity.

[alehlopeh]

I am jealous of people with larger touchscreens in their car.

[ryanbrunner]

I wonder if there's a way to make physical controls feel more premium via materials / design. In other consumer goods, there's definitely a market for physical design that feels more well-engineered with things like using metal and thoughtful trim. It's not surprising that people find black plastic buttons not particularly premium looking.

[fluidcruft]

It's somewhat interesting because I'm finding that I don't find touchscreens particularly "premium" looking. Touch screens and LCD screens seem to be everywhere nowadays in low-class places and look like obvious cost-cutting like Walmart and fast food drive-thru.

Back in the day, you could easily tell the difference between an expensive high-quality amplifier and a molded piece-of-plastic mass-produced boombox.

[_fat_santa]

I think the way is to make them configurable. When you first setup the car you decide which controls will be "exposed" to the hardware knobs. In the winter time you may configure a knob to give you heated seats, during the summer you reconfigure it to provide max AC in one touch.

Car companies are already kind of doing this, usually just a button or two on the steering wheel. But IMO the entire dash should be a bunch of blank configurable buttons.

[t0mas88]

BMW did this in the 7 series and I think some 5 series. A row of buttons in the center console that you can choose what they do. Unlike old style "preset" buttons they have a sensor in them to detect your finger being on the button before pressing it, and then it shows at the top of the iDrive screen what that button is programmed to do. I thought that was quite an elegant way to fix the "can't remember what I made this one do" issue you get with programmable buttons.

[lajosbacs]

I think all of them from the 2010's had this, at least my 3 series does.

[garaetjjte]

You could place small e-ink displays on programmable buttons.

[fluidcruft]

That might be pretty cool, but a complete nightmare for shared/rental cars.

[ghaff]

The complexity of modern car interfaces--including those that use random buttons--is already a massive pain in rentals. At least for nav, things like CarPlay standardize to some degree. But I frequently find myself hunting for all sorts of things on a rental.

[mrtksn]

European, especially the German brands are very good at that. The sound and the feel of buttons and switches are known to feel premium.

Actually, Porsche Taycan apparently has an amazing knob. MKBHD was very impressed by it[0].

[0] https://youtu.be/BAZX9p2oGOg?t=631

[eps]

Top of the line S6 comes with glossy plastic buttons on the steering wheel. Extremely cheap look and feel. No idea what they were thinking.

[Cthulhu_]

Definitely, I believe BMW for example had a big knob that just feels padded and luxurious. Same with car interiors; thicker padding, better noise insulation (e.g. when closing a door) makes things feel more premium.

[lmpdev]

I see this occuring through material choice, see: https://www.busterandpunch.com/

[croes]

So instead of the whiteness and type of your business card it's now the size of your touchscreen.

[workingon]

maybe stop hanging out with narcissistic rich people, no one i talk to would ever make comments like that

[mrtksn]

On the contrary, rich narcissistic people already have the touchscreens in their cars. Those who wish their cars had a large touchscreen are people who can buy a new car every 5 to 10 years and they bough 2-3 years ago and didn't pay for a touchscreen upgrade.

But maybe the jealousy is a too strong of a word.

[bluGill]

I have a touchscreen on my 10 year old minivan. 10 years old and mini-van both loudly scream that this is not a vehicle that you buy to show off. 15 years ago a touchscreen was a novelty to show off, but now everyone has them.

[croes]

If you need to showboat you are not rich

[mrtksn]

Most people are not rich and car companies want to sell as many cars as possible, which means they need to sell it to the most people who are not rich.

[734129837261]

Most people who aren't rich are poor because they showboat.