Keep in mind, that new cars aren't bad simply because of all this new tech, but rather how this tech is exposed to the user. HCI seems to have disappeared by the wayside as we create more and more complicated systems.
Yet it is possible to apply good interaction design to complex systems. Taking the example from the car itself -- the engine and transmission is a very complicated system, yet it's exposed to the user through simple and learnable controls like steering wheel, the gear shift, and the pedals.
In these examples it's painfully obvious that human-machine interaction and user experience design was either an afterthought, or developed by people who are simply not qualified to actually design interactive systems altogether.
You're kidding right? Apple under Jony Ive without Steve gave us the worst generation of Macbook Pros: butterfly keyboard, limited ports, and the touchbar.
Recently upgraded my work laptop to an M1 and I gotta say I miss the touchbar. Very sad that they got rid of it seemingly forever. Concretely it was great for managing screen recording. But in general I don’t understand the backlash, especially once they added a physical escape key for my fellow vim heads.
The haters won but I wonder what their victory cost us. Am I supposed to be happy I got my F11 key back??
The touchpads are absolutely absurdly large, Apple could have easily made it a little bit smaller and fit both a row of function keys and the touch bar.
I agree, I'm on the 2019 16" MBP, the one with physical ESC and touchbar. I honestly love the touchbar once you spice it up with BetterTouchTool you can make it extremely useful.
After Steve Jobs died it became clear that Ive needed both someone to give him direction and to filter his outoput. Steve Jobs knew something about users. Ive demonstrably didn't and, to speak plainly, managed to lodge his head so far up his own behind that he completely lost sight of the user. As a result he managed to gradually alienate key demographics among laptop users. Including designing laptops that would gradually self-destruct due to completely careless design (like blowing hot air on components that really, really shouldn't have hot air blown on them).
AI (specifically voice recognition and LLM’s) can probably help solve this problem by having the LLM control things for you while “talk to the thing like a human” is the exposed interface.
Yet it is possible to apply good interaction design to complex systems. Taking the example from the car itself -- the engine and transmission is a very complicated system, yet it's exposed to the user through simple and learnable controls like steering wheel, the gear shift, and the pedals.
In these examples it's painfully obvious that human-machine interaction and user experience design was either an afterthought, or developed by people who are simply not qualified to actually design interactive systems altogether.