Doesn’t it also display warnings, cleaning and maintenance messages ?

All coffee machines I’ve seen with any kind of screen made extensive use of it for messaging purposes. It is a lot more useful than some led blinking twice for cleaning and three times when there’s no water in the tank.

Many with screens have actual buttons for input though.

Probably cheaper to localise.

Rather than having to do X front panels, you just put all localisation data in a config file and be done with it.

And yes, I would much prefer actual pushbuttons.

The labels can still go on the LCD, with hardware buttons on the side. The machine at work has those, and there is definitely a language selector hiding somewhere within its menu system...

My building is getting new elevators right now, they just finished the first one last month. Biggest unexpected change: There's a touchscreen for selecting what floor you want. All it displays is a static list of numbers.

I would've thought maybe it's a hygiene thing, easier to clean a flat surface, except below it is a number keypad with only 0-9, where you can also pick a floor by typing in your floor number. Plus, ground floor has its own independent physical button.

I've already gotten into the habit of ignoring the touchscreen and using the physical buttons as a mini rebellion - there's a security camera in the elevator, maybe someone will pick up on it.

We share a kitchenette at work with another company. They had a Keurig with a LCD display on it that didn't look like it did much of anything. A few months ago they replaced it with a newer model, and this one just has buttons.

I don't know if that's people getting some design sense and not using screens where they don't need to, or just happenstance. But it seemed relevant.

I have worked on embedded software with and without touchscreen UIs, and in some cases a touchscreen was used where it did not make sense. Peak touchscreen was around the time of the huge iPhone / iPad media sensation. Since that is over, it's probably getting better.

I like to imagine that whatever company makes these little touchscreens employs the Michael Jordan of B2B salespeople.

Planned obsolescence. The coffee machine can probably go 5-7 years, but the touch panel gets 3-5 with heavy use.