tft lcds got in this too because they’re so dirt cheap and capacitive touch interfaces are cheap as fuck to manufacture. Even if the parts costs are a tiny bit higher relative to physical buttons and interfaces the money saved on assembly makes up for it (and in some cases the parts actually are cheaper

Plus in a kitchen or bathroom setting this is much easier to make water and dust resistant, which is an actual benefit tbf, but at the expense of ergonomics and accessibility

You can literally go on Amazon right now and search LCD toaster. There’s the $4-500 ultra bougie American designed (not made lol) smart one but then there are a ton of Chinese designed ones that are like $50-60 because it’s a $20 toaster with a (when bought at scale) $0.95 lcd strapped on

Marketing is dumb, this is why I left ui/ux/hci work. You can create an ergonomic and intuitive system that is evidence based and the ad men will be like “but can we pander to the lowest common denominator by ruining it with some useless feature that’s objectively worse to use?” And then they just dropped the pretense and said fuck ux, embrace dark patterns

I could bitch about this for days