I agree (also from a career in embedded). People forget that before Bluetooth Low Energy and everyone walking around with cheap, sophisticated computers in thei

I agree (also from a career in embedded). People forget that before Bluetooth Low Energy and everyone walking around with cheap, sophisticated computers in their pockets, putting an easily navigable menu on a machine that didn't otherwise need one was expensive. If your machine didn't need a keypad or a display in normal operation, you simply wouldn't have one. Maybe you'd show error codes by blinking an LED in a certain pattern. These days, it's cheap to have an available BLE connection to a cell phone that can provide a nice text or graphical control screen to tell you everything you need to know about the machine. A lot of the cost is in the UI and that gets offloaded to the the user's phone.