LCARS is the ultimate evolution of the smart phone interface.
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The huge symbol of my organization in the upper left of the corner is in case the psychic monster of the week makes me forget again which side I am on.
You might not like it, but that is what peak UI performance looks like.
Jokes aside, Star Trek was the first show where I become aware of the concept of how practical a tablet would be, long before tablets were a reasonable thing to build, mind you. The stuff they have in these old shows seems pretty blase these days, like picard facetiming the star trek official of the week in his private office on his tiny netbook like thing but that was pretty cool stuff back then, if you watch the shows now it's easy to forget we didn't actually have any of that. When I started watching that show my main computer had a CPU with less than 10 MHz and could practically only do 32 colors at once. Remember that.
From an engineering standpoint, touch interfaces sadly make a lot of sense. If you put buttons in such devices, every button makes things a lot more complicated and also more expensive. Buttons also fail, their assembly is complicated, they're a lot of additional parts (in case of actual mechanical buttons parts of a completely other realm of electrical engineering altogether) so you need additional suppliers, they need to be connected to something inside your device and things just get more and more complicated with each new button. It really changes the nature of your entire device. On top of that, there's a small but distinct possibility to fuck up buttons to a point where people still talk about it ten years down the road. A touch screen is simple. You hook it up to the SoC/MCU and beyond that point it's a software thing. It doesn't wear down. It's multi functional - every square millimeter of the touch screen can be whatever you like, from display to button, or hell - both at once - the software engineer can decide this and it'll always be changeable over the lifetime of the device.
The downside is people want the haptic feedback of the mechanical control. Not any control mind you, the good, pricier one. From the standpoint of whoever does the budgeting even trying to fulfill that wish doesn't make any sense. So touchscreen it is. It's really the same with additional connectors. Brings up the cost of price per unit and makes it all more complicated and most people really do not care. You'd be surprised how many phones do not implement the USB-C port even up to full spec, which sometimes is just a question of a few passive parts and additonal traces on the PCB. A fraction of a penny saved is a fraction of a penny earned. If you want to protest any of this, my tip is to buy the expensive devices and use them for a long time and talk about how you still use yours. People rarely do though.
