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The original was posted on /r/explainlikeimfive by /u/Fiempre_sin_tabla on 2023-06-25 23:08:18+00:00.

In the past, many electronic (not talking about old-old purely mechanical) control dials were “clicky” – there’s probably a better word for it; I don’t just mean that there was a click-stop/detent effect to turning the knob. But each click used to always give a specific increment of control. Example: on a washing machine, if there were (say) twelve different cycle options, each one had its own certain detent, and when you reached that detent, you got that cycle. It did not matter if you reached that detent by turning the knob slowly or fast. If you wanted whatever the seventh cycle around the dial was, you just had to glance at the dial and see where it was, then you could select your chosen cycle without looking: if the dial started all the way counterclockwise, you could rotate it (fast or slow) through six click-stops. If the dial started two cycles to the left of your chosen one, you could rotate it (slow or fast) through two click-stops. And you’d arrive at your chosen cycle every time.

Or on a dryer, if there was a dial to choose a time between 10 and 90 minutes, passing through each detent added or took away a certain specific number of minutes on the display, no matter how slowly or fast you passed through the detents.

Same on an oven with a dial to set a temperature between 95 and 290 °C; passing through a single detent added or took away a specific number of degrees (usually 5 or 10)…again, no matter if you slowly and deliberately crossed each detent, or grabbed the knob and gave it a zesty spin.

But that isn’t how it is any more. The volume and tuning knobs on my last two car radios (from 2008 and 2016) have been “stretchy”, and same with two different washers, one from 2003 and one from 2020, and also a dryer from 2020: You power on the device, and if you very slowly turn the knob you get one increment per detent, but if you spin it faster it “slips”. You can hear/feel you went through a bunch of detents, but you only jumped one cycle, or only added or took away a small number of dryer-minutes or a small amount of radio-volume. If you keep grabbing and spinning, you can eventually get to what you want, but you’ll rack up a big total of detents crossed. I find this disorientating and annoying; why even have detents if they’re fake like this?

I get that we’re no longer using old-time electro-mechanical or even past-type electronic controls, but I don’t get why modern controls have to be this way. Is it something inherent to the hardware we use now?