Once I had an MP3 player. I could use its features: play/pause/next/previous, adjust volume, and that’s basically it. Life was good.
But I made the regrettable decision to find a new one. And the pickings are disappointing. Either I have to constrain myself to cheap-looking gadgets that fit the bill with mechanical buttons but often limited storage and dubious life, make and audio quality, or ,there’s a shift towards MP3 players being luxury audiophile products with touchscreens or a 150$+ premium to be able to spend another 100$ on an SD card to expand the storage.
And as appealing as a touchscreen may be, its fatal downside is that it is unusable unless you can see it. Which is ridiculous. It limits its usability in bright outdoors conditions without comprising battery life for a backlight - it makes using it in conditions where you don’t need distractions like driving or study, distracting and sometimes even impossible!, (and yes, using my smartphone as an MP3 player is a distraction as well, though I’d also call it a mistake)
And most insultingly, button functionality generally gets kicked down the line to a button somewhere else! Miss the play/pause/prev/next features? Why, here’s a little plastic doohickey on these earbuds that does ALL of them. Just master the one-click, two-click triple-click click-and-hold ninja jutsu and maybe one day you’ll be able to skip to the next track without pausing and then replaying the one you just listened to without having to look at your screen!
From this perspective, it comes across that touchscreens have impaired designers abilities to use their brains. Yes, a touchscreen is great if you don’t want to force people to use a scroll wheel or d-pad to type stuff. But are they going to be typing stuff or are they going to be listening to music? And if they need to, why not just support hardware like a modern Bluetooth Keyboard if it matters so much? You could afford to have someone else add the doohickey to the earbuds for merely playing/pausing without touching the screen, what’s a missing keyboard going to harm? The listening experience?
