I am tired of ordinary controls being moved onto glossy touch panels. A physical button may look less futuristic in a product photo, but it tells you where it is, whether you pressed it, and often what it will do before the device has even powered up. That is a very good interface for something you use every day.
Touch controls are fine when the available actions genuinely change with context. A phone screen needs that flexibility. A lamp, cooker, car heater, pair of headphones, or coffee machine usually does not. Replacing a familiar switch with an unlabelled capacitive patch saves visible clutter while moving the confusion into the person using it.
The worst versions fail silently. Wet fingers, gloves, poor lighting, lag, or a frozen interface can turn a simple adjustment into repeated tapping and guesswork. A decent button gives tactile feedback and can be found without staring at it. A rotary control is even better when the task is moving through a range, because its position and movement communicate something useful.
I do not want every gadget to look like industrial equipment from 1987. I just want designers to stop treating the absence of controls as proof of good design. If a function is common, important, and always available, give it a real button. Clean glass is not worth making the product more annoying.
