I'm glad I'm not the only one noticing appliances getting worse across the board. I don't buy enough of them to really know if the trend holds overall but the correlation is pretty much perfect between how new an appliance is and how much I hate it. For example the controls on my new LG washer and dryer are incredible bad. They've made it hard to impossible to just set the run level manually to push you into set programs for bedding or whatever. But they never work right! We've given up on using those programs entirely because they are terrible.
The main culprits I've seen are cheaping out on quality, replacing traditional controls with touch screens or "AI" magic buttons, and squeezing in more monetization streams or adding gimmicky features that actively make the product worse.
Maybe things will turn around someday. There are a few rays of hope, like the touchscreen fad in cars gradually losing its luster, but it seems like we've been on the wrong path for a long time and I'm not sure it will ever correct.
The main culprits I've seen are cheaping out on quality, replacing traditional controls with touch screens or "AI" magic buttons, and squeezing in more monetization streams or adding gimmicky features that actively make the product worse.
Maybe things will turn around someday. There are a few rays of hope, like the touchscreen fad in cars gradually losing its luster, but it seems like we've been on the wrong path for a long time and I'm not sure it will ever correct.