Modern 'Smart-to-smartstupid' design evolution:

1. Once there were consumer devices with a few buttons and switches. They really worked and they were amazing.

2. Then manufacturers added extra features, and extra buttons/switches for them. It was a feature trade war. Extra controls meant better. Everybody wins. Buttons and switches were cheap to make. Manufacturing was intricate and people-intensive but the products were plentiful.

2a. These buttons and switches had springs that gave them snap and finger feedback. There were standard leaf switches and generic microswitches, made in the billions, that were fitted with custom caps.

3. There was always 'proverbial' group that always complained that the "extra controls made it too complicated to use".

4. It turns out these complainers were really 'paid consumer focus groups' that wanted to be in the design loop. We never used to listen to such people in real life, just asshole control freaks whose idea of a certain switch being 'useless clutter' was actually their lack of understanding of what it did. These are the kind of people today who if you post a specific question on a hacker forum, you get an answer "why would you want to do that?" with no follow through. But people like this sleazed their way into corporate life. Their projection of the average consumer 'enraged' by too many controls was a self-serving myth to keep them into the design loop and introduce dubious measures that created more confusion than saved cost. We made fun of them and companies that adopted their practices, and continued to buy things with lots of controls.

5. Microcontrollers hit the market. Now often the driving logic was digital, but those switches, controls and simple displays were still there and part of the interface. They were polled often enough to simulate the more component-intensive analog experience. It was the golden age of debouncing.

6. Displays became matrix and alphanumeric. Almost at once a drive began to eliminate controls in favor of on screen menus and multi-use buttons. This was a boon to complicated processes like industrial control systems, which always maintained separate essential controls, but NOT so much to those consumer devices. On consumer devices something that used to be a switch was now a hidden menu option. Humans can easily memorize switch positions, but started struggling with menus.

7. The fall of modern civilization really accelerated with the PLAY button that was also the PAUSE button, the STOP button that forgets where you had been and '<<' and '>>' buttons that change their operation based not how long you held it but also how flaky the button is made. Where once people were angered by membrane and 'chicklet' button membranes, now people accept them even in expensive devices... with their brief lifespan, and for at least half of the brief lifespan the controls are a source of chronic frustration. For the shaky and the elderly, constant frustration.

8. Displays became color and HD and touch screens appeared. Web site design rejects -- not engineers or people familiar with previous consumer devices -- were hired to populate the screens and build the menus. There is whitespace and visual clutter, too many levels, few if any actual controls, and often used controls are two operations deep. Onscreen pop-up QWERTY or ABCD keyboards have replaced the simple act of including an actual keyboard with the device, even when it would save frustration in daily use.

9. Now Internet connectivity was integrated, postponing a full design cycle even further as devices were released before they could even compete favorable with their previous generations. The Android is probably the best-of-breed of this genre where screen interface and driving logic can be integrated into a brick that is set into other boxes... but at a very steep price. Few suppliers.

10. Its thinness is an affront to the serviceability of previous eras. Small displays on large empty panels and empty enclosures, that once were populated with controls performing immediate functions. A tiny window into the whole machine.

...

Because of those switches and buttons, people used to operate devices while doing something else, while looking somewhere else. In the dark, by rote and by habit. They were 'big' but big meant real speakers, beefy batteries and things that couldn't get lost under a sheet of paper or left on the bus seat.

Now you have to gaze intently at a small screen, figure out where you are, stabilize the device to place your fingers just so on a surface that will not work well when wet, squint in the sunlight, fumble while holding things designed to slip out of your hand so the precious glass shatters as it hits the ground... while trying to discern whether present state will accept an operation from pressing a button that isn't there.

I predict that the next consumer craze will be things that look and operate like they did in the 1980s.