crabman

I don't think they're stupid, I think they lack my experience; I'll get back to that. In any event I've got 5 engineers a few floors below me, they are smart, I give them that. Smart isn't always found at the squishy end of a slide rule though; they do make mistakes in a variety of ways and one of them is not knowing the full impact of a choice at the time they made it. It's also true that some things aren't deliberately iterated just for marketing or various profit motives: Sometimes they're broken and need to be fixed.

As an example: Tidal lacks basic and fundamental features that actually break its functionality. If you only had so much space and did what you could with the space you had, well, you used the space you had as best you could. It's a choice you have to make sometimes because putting as much monitor as you can in confined spaces does lead to software decisions that limit functionality at times, It's a thing. I get it. On the other hand, when you are missing fundamental features that break software and have full modern smartphones worth of unused space on the relevant screen in your GUI you have a bad design, there is no getting around that.

But lets circle back to experience and touch controls. I owned the first car with an all touch cabin. It was a mistake that they later changed because people didn't like it and this did show in their product data in the form of lost sales. I think MB will see the same, and you're going to have (some) more hard buttons come back in the future. I do get why they try to push the touch cabins considering the lower costs starting in design and going all the way to warranty on the back end, it makes sense if you can get away with it and that's really the crux of it. What my experience is telling me that they will add a few physical buttons because they're not an Apple or Tesla who can tell their customers they should like whatever they shovel and get away with it.

I've been wrong before and it could be I am now. We'll see.