It's not just the buttons themselves (in a capacitive-vs-mechanical sense) -- it's also warranty services.

When the electronicals are bottled up behind a sheet of glass or Perspex or whatever, then: They tend to last longer because their operating environment becomes less hazardous to them.

Exact hourly rates vary too much to write about specifics, but whatever they are: Sending a tech out to look at a thing costs real money (in the ballpark of hundreds of dollars, not dozens) that really bites into profit margin of any individual unit sale.

It bites into the margin even if the root problem is that the owner's roommate's friend pissed into the control panel with a head full of acid. They'll still be paying someone to physically go out and make that determination.

So if mush-buttons generate fewer service calls than push-buttons do, then: It's a big advantage to a manufacturer.

So... I think it's quite easy to understand how we got to where we are: Fewer moving parts + better environmental isolation for those parts = less after-sale risk.

(I don't necessarily like it, but there's lots of other things in the world that make good financial sense at the manufacturing level that I'm also not fond of. I can accept this reality without also pretending that it can't make sense for someone, somewhere.

Good answers? Speed Queen, for one, still makes good washers with real knobs and real buttons, for the consumer who favors these features.

Just add a smart plug or current monitoring and an iteration of Home Assistant or whatever running on a sleepy little Raspberry Pi or a VM/container or something to detect and notify soon after the wash is done. End-of-cycle detection is really all that is ever needed for smarts anyway. And that may sound convoluted, but these are smarts that you control yourself and are about as open-source as anyone may wish them to be.

(I don't want an appliance that I hope to last for 20 years or more to be connected to any networks at all: "Wake up, babe; new rootkit just dropped and our clothes washer is fucked" isn't a meme that I want to live through, even if it does have a nice API running on a stack that was last updated in [checks calendar] 2005.))

> End-of-cycle detection is really all that is ever needed for smarts anyway

To me that would be the least interesting part about a smart washing machine. Like when I start it, I can already see when it's going to be done. The part I'm really interested in is preloading and autostart it at a given time. Guess it's usecase related what one considers "needed for smarts"