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It’s not just having physical buttons that matters, they must also not have other poor design decisions. Our secondary, very short trip car, is an old 2008 VW

It’s not just having physical buttons that matters, they must also not have other poor design decisions. Our secondary, very short trip car, is an old 2008 VW Polo and although it has physical AC and recycle air buttons, they chose to make them be toggle buttons as opposed to ones you can feel/see are pressed in or not. They have a backlight to indicate their “on” status but (and maybe it’s worse because it’s old) you can’t see the backlight in bright sunlight and I have to shadow them with my hand to see. The final annoyance with this is if I turn off the car with the fan speed turned to “off”, when I next start the car it has forgotten the on/off state of each of the two buttons. So these buttons, although being physical, are almost as bad as soft touch buttons. If they had just made them buttons which are either pressed in or out, all these annoyances wouldn’t exist. Obviously the Polos would have changed completely now, but I haven’t checked VWs much though as in South Africa you get considerably less car for your money compared to most other brands, but VWs still seem pretty popular for what I can only guess is status symbol reasons.

usrusr 2y ago
State at bootup is a legitimate trade-off decision though: some states you want to survive a power cycle, others you want to reset, and still others you'd want to have a user-configurable default state. Momentary + indicator makes all of that easy, whereas a mechanical off state with powered reset on bootup (or on shutdown) would be a pretty wild "no expense spared" approach. Momentary + indicator vs mechanical toggle really is more than just penny pinching, it's more like not burning wads of banknotes. And it gets even more clear when you enter the present days and add additional inputs like voice control or defaults associated with a personal keyfob.
- psd1 2y ago
  Or you could just turn the button off manually. This is manufacturers inventing a meaningless distinction. The value of controls that perfectly implement your wishes is not great over controls that you just fucken set, even without the terrible ergonomics that the former brings.

usrusr 2y ago

State at bootup is a legitimate trade-off decision though: some states you want to survive a power cycle, others you want to reset, and still others you'd want to have a user-configurable default state. Momentary + indicator makes all of that easy, whereas a mechanical off state with powered reset on bootup (or on shutdown) would be a pretty wild "no expense spared" approach. Momentary + indicator vs mechanical toggle really is more than just penny pinching, it's more like not burning wads of banknotes. And it gets even more clear when you enter the present days and add additional inputs like voice control or defaults associated with a personal keyfob.

psd1 2y ago
Or you could just turn the button off manually. This is manufacturers inventing a meaningless distinction. The value of controls that perfectly implement your wishes is not great over controls that you just fucken set, even without the terrible ergonomics that the former brings.