Too Simple To Figure Out Dept...!?!

I remember well the old American cars that needed front end parts every 20k miles, new clutch every 30k, and so forth. Those were longevity/reliability issues, and I think the tide finally turned when the Japanese cars started "beating the pants" off the Detroit cars in these respects. The rant of this thread is the increased complexity, reduced usability, and service cost/complexity of newer things with electronic controls. I already ranted about that. I should have added that it can be done better. For example I've got about a half dozen "tear your hair out to set" clocks. Then there's the one in the Advantium oven that's very fast and easy to set. It uses a rotary encoder (i.e. a knob). Yes, that increases the cost, and that's the main driver of the bad designs. Many years ago I worked in an outfit that manufactured modem boards. For cost reduction, management ordered a couple of status LEDs off the boards over the engineers objections. It saved a nickle a board in manufacturing cost. You might have heard on the news of voters in Texas complaining that the electronic machines changed their vote. The manufacturer is saying the machine is working correctly and the votes are changed due to mistakes by the voters. This is typical high-tech "blame the user" mentality. Make the user conform to what the designers think is the way it should be done. Change the person to conform to the machine. That's the kind of thing that's making the newer cars a bunch of high tech junk.