(Dobbs) Oh For The Good Ol' Days of LOW Tech!
It's not always better life through engineering. Some stuff is OVER-engineered.
Bring back the buttons, enough with the high-tech already!
You know how, when you watch news coverage of a serious storm, there’s usually a shot of some poor ol’ soul’s car that got crushed by a fallen tree? Back in April, during unprecedented hurricane-force winds where I live, I was that poor ol’ soul. It was my car under the tree. Totaled.
Among the first things I thought of after it happened was that I had just spent 50 bucks filling the tank with gas but got only seven miles' worth of driving out of it before getting back home where BOOM, just moments after parking out front, the tree blew down. Another was that I had struggled with the temptation to pick up a fast-food hamburger right after filling up, but I resisted it. Bad call! Had I stopped for a few minutes to buy that burger, the tree would have fallen when it did, but my car wouldn’t have been under it.
Still, I was lucky. First, because I’d gotten out of the car before the tree came tumbling down. And second, because despite the scourge of supply chain shortages, I was able to get a new one.
Of course it’s not as if the car that got totaled had been ready for the junkyard. It was almost brand new itself, model year 2021. The replacement is a 2022. But between ’21 and ’22, something changed.
The buttons. They’re almost all gone.
In the old car, my muscle memory knew how to direct my hand to where every control was, whether I wanted to adjust the fan, direct the airflow, switch to internal recirculation, heat the seats, or anything else. What’s more, once muscle memory put my finger at the right spot, a tactile button confirmed that it was where it wanted to be.
Almost one-stop shopping.
In the new car? It’s almost all on a touchscreen and as you see from the smudges in this picture, I’ve touched it a lot.
So instead of simply feeling the fan switch and clicking it up or down, I’ve first got to touch the screen to get the icons to show up— then again touch it where it says “Touch to turn screen on” and nowhere else— then I’ve got to visually find the function I want, then I’ve got to get my finger to the right spot but, without any tactile response, sometimes it’s the wrong spot, and then, even if it’s right, I’ve got to press it or slide it on a two-dimensional flat screen to accomplish what I want to accomplish.
All, by the way, while driving.
And here’s the catch: once I touch the screen to light it up, I have precisely 3.4 seconds to do all that. Really! I timed it three times. 3.4 seconds, then it goes dark, and if I haven’t managed to do what I need to do, I have to start the process all over again.
A friend of mine assures me my muscle memory will get used to the new system. Maybe it will, some day. But it’s been five months so far. It hasn’t yet.
Better life through over-engineering?
I don’t think so. Because here’s another catch: when I’m flying down the interstate highway, I really shouldn’t be taking my eyes off the road for 3.4 seconds. Let alone 3.4 seconds twice. Aren’t safety experts trying to get us not to look at our phone screens when we’re driving? So now we’re looking at our dashboard screens instead. What’s the difference?
I realize, this is the future. According to Consumer Reports, roughly 98.8% of all new cars in the U.S. have a touchscreen display. According to the literature, it’s a lot cheaper for automakers to provide a single screen controlled by software than a dozen dials and switches and buttons with separate wiring for each.
Motor Trend doesn’t seem to like this whole motor trend, complaining, “It’s significantly easier to locate a physical control than hunting through sub-menus.” On CarsGuide.com, automotive journalist Stephen Ottley is more caustic: “Car brands are turning dashboards into mobile computers, and it sucks.”
And none more than Tesla. The other day I had to go out of town and rented a Tesla at the airport. Almost everything, and I’m not exaggerating, almost everything is controlled on a centrally-mounted flatscreen display.
This means even the speed indicator is off at an angle rather than right in front of your nose. It took me several minutes to even find the faint arrows I needed to change the temperature inside the car. At one point I had to pull over but never could find the emergency blinkers. And the windshield wipers? A sub-menu inside a sub-menu. Not real helpful when the sky opens up. And again, all while flying down the road.
In fairness, like the curmudgeon I can be, I was complaining about all this the other day to the general manager at my dealership, and he told me something I didn’t know about my car: to adjust the fan or heat the seats— or tune to a new setting on the audio system or make a phone call or a bunch of other things— you don’t have to touch the screen at all. That’s because you can talk to it. You can tell the car to do what you don’t have time to safely do on the screen.
As it turns out, you can talk to your Tesla too.
So there is a go-around. But still…..
Meantime, it’s made me think about other marvels of high-tech engineering that, while they have their benefits, can drive me up the wall. Like the remotes for our TVs. Not long ago I was in a hotel, and wanted to watch a movie. Good luck! Like so many multiple-remote-control homes these days, it took not just one remote but two to even activate the system. These are the two remotes. Take a look at all their almost indecipherable buttons. I counted them so you don’t have to.
The remote on the right has 32 buttons. On the left, 47. Just to watch a movie. What ever happened to on/off?
But that wasn’t the end of it. After finding the right buttons to find the right screen, I had to make a bluetooth connection to my phone, and somehow pair my Netflix app to the hotel room. I went through the steps as instructed, but something still wasn’t working— granted, maybe it was my brain— but eventually I had to call the hotel switchboard operator to ask for help, hopefully some kind of old-fashioned go-around to reach my goal. Catch 22. He directed me to a YouTube video to show me how to do it.
Mind you, I’m not brainless about technology. I successfully use my share of high-tech devices. But maybe I’m not the guy to sing its praises. Back in the late 1980s, I did a feature story for Good Morning America from the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in which Caller ID was shown as the next “big thing.” I did a wry if cynical report which basically said, “Oh, com’n, you’ve got to be kidding, you really expect us to believe that someday we’ll actually be able to see who’s calling us before we even answer the phone?”
Got that wrong. But still…..
And while we’re on the subject of high-tech, how about golf? Ever since it evolved from players hitting pebbles over sand dunes in Scotland to players hitting balls into sand dunes worldwide, it has been played pretty much the same. Until now. Rangefinders, which use GPS to tell golfers on a fairway how many yards they are from the flag, have caught on. They help them decide which club to swing and how hard to swing it.
Even the PGA last year allowed the big-money pros to use them. Early greats like Sam Snead and Ben Hogan must be rolling in their graves.
This is different than technology in other spectator sports, which is designed to make it easier for spectators to follow the game, not for athletes to play it. Our televisions can show us the first-down line in football, the speed of a pitch in baseball, the path of a puck in hockey. But that doesn’t make it any easier for the running back to know where the line is, the batter to know the speed of the ball heading his way, or the goalie to spot the puck. It just makes it easier for the viewer to watch. I don’t play golf, so it’s easy for me to say, but doesn’t it seem like using a rangefinder is sidestepping a traditional challenge of the game?
Then again, baseball has stepped over that dark line too. A device called PitchCom lets a catcher communicate the pitch he wants to an earpiece in the pitcher’s cap, without his fingers giving it away to the prying eyes of the other team. Yet stealing those signs is a tradition of the game. Is nothing sacred?
Not that low-tech is nirvana. It too can be over-engineered. Have you ever felt like you needed a chainsaw to open a package of batteries? Or a microscope to find the “easy peel” flap to rip open a stick of string cheese? At a reception desk the other day I picked up a sample-size packet of those little round malted milk balls called Whoppers.
I tried my fingernails to open them, I tried my teeth. They all failed! Sure, sometimes impenetrable packaging is necessary. A friend I had just been with called while I was writing this piece to tell me he tested positive for Covid, so immediately I did a home test. I know the test is a sensitive thing, so it made sense that I needed scissors to extract the tube from the test kit. But Whoppers? Do we have to carry scissors now just to have a Whopper?
Compared to real issues like inflation and politics, hunger and climate change and war, these are the epitome of First World problems. But the First World is our world, and I wish someone would sit up and take note: sometimes things are best the way they are, even if they feel like yesterday’s technology. Sometimes over-engineering— whether it’s a car or a candy wrapper— is a step in the wrong direction.
Over almost five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks including ABC News, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He has covered presidencies and politics at home and international crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Nicaragua to Namibia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, and the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists.
Have you seen this editorial yet? It is thoughtful, and spot on. I have a stick (manual transmission), and am avoiding giving it up as long as I can.
The End of Manual Transmission
Stick shifts are dying. When they go, something bigger than driving will be lost.
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2022/08/stick-shift-manual-transmission-cars/671078/?
I enjoyed your essay very much. I was laughing out loud (note the use of real words) in agreement and commiseration. I find I am unable to do things that any 5-year-old of today can do with ease. By the time I figure out how to proceed, I have lost track of what I was trying to accomplish. Still and all, glad to be here.