At least they got OLED style touch screens, and for a while it looked like everything would go that way but at least in cars some are going back to physical buttons.
On that note, physical buttons are tactile and easier to navigate while driving and thus safer. You don't have to take your eyes off the road and worry about a fussy touchscreen registering your tap. You just feel around for the control and manipulate it.
The appeal of a touchscreen is that you can change the interface. It can assume a wide range of control panels, which, in a car, isn't always useful. For functions you need immediately, you can't beat a fixed physical widget.
Now, what would be interesting is a surface whose physical texture and physical controls could be dynamically changed and reconfigured. So, a flat surface becomes a series of buttons, and then maybe a rotating knob in the next. Perhaps tactile holograms. I don't think something like this could beat physical controls for reliable and lasting function either, however.
I also have to wonder what the 'dead' guy's plan was after Kirk would get convicted for his death. Presumably he'd need to climb out of whatever rathole he was hiding in for breakfast, and I'd presume someone on the ship would notice that the dead guy is alive, and that the conviction should be overturned.
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Truly, the level of and attention to security on the Enterprise-C was shameful. In "The Conscience of a King" (an excellent episode), one of the traveling actors manages to - not only steal a weapon - presumably from the armory - but also rig it to explode and plant it in the Captain's quarters.
Starfleet in that era should have seriously formed an independent, no-bullshit, no-nonsense commission to ask the relevant enlisted and commissioned officers pressing questions, like 'Did you, or did you not leave the hatch coaming on Deck C open, thus allowing an enemy agent access to the arms locker? Are you in collusion with enemy agents?'
My headcannon for this is that even though it's technically possible, it's so unethical they just choose to never do it.
[0] https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Valiant_(episode)#:~:te...
DS9 is great because it showed us the darker side of the federation. They can afford to be like this because they've got Space CIA committing atrocities behind the scenes since day one.
IF theres something unethical that they choose not to do, you can be sure Sisko is doing it.
It doesn't come with nearly the same level of implausibility (causality problems) that FTL does IMHO.
PADD was still futuristic enough at that time but what they didn't predict behind scenes was multitasking in software. Characters in old series were seen working on multiple devices like on multi-page documents. Tho, you can always say that it was just a gimmick to show character being really busy.
Some 30 years ago there was this Australian tv show for kids created where by sheer luck a damaged satellite fixed itself and let group of random kids around the world magically have a Zoom-like meetings for education and... making art thieves lives miserable. Prop department utilized still new at that time Sharp OZ-7000 (one of first such devices, before even PDA was coined) as communication device equipped with small colored LCD and weird looking "gem" camera. Back then that was a futuristic fantasy that seem impossible. And here we are, with smartphones that can make video calls at ease by Internet for last few years.
People do that in real life all the time even with the ability to do everything on one handheld device today. People pick up preferences for using "apps" on specific devices, or have multi-tasking use cases where flowing across devices feels nice or makes the most sense.
For instance: Using an iPad to read a kitchen recipe and calling to Alexa or Siri on a nearby Echo or HomePod to set a kitchen timer while watching a show on a kitchen screen, say powered by an Apple TV. The iPad could picture-in-picture the show and track the timer and show the recipe all at the same time, but that's not the experience everyone wants. It's not even the experience that Apple wants to sell to people. If you've got an iPad and HomePod in the same room and call for Siri, the software is built to prefer the HomePod and its smarter array of microphones to listen for what comes next. It's better, more dedicated hardware to help the software deliver a better experience.
It's great that one device can do everything, but we rarely want to use one device to do everything when we don't have to. Especially because human memory is contextual and spatial it becomes easier to remember where we "left" things if they are on different devices in different places.
Especially in TNG it feels like a lot of the screens are designed for exactly that: the screens can change to other displays but most often don't because they are very specifically tailored to each specific place they are. That seems somewhat intentionally designed to help the human memory and better muscle memory, knowing what we knew in the 90s and knowing what we know today. "I don't want to lose my place in this recipe just to set a timer or to catch up on TV" is a human problem and TNG showing "I don't want to lose my place on this PADD so I'll ask the computer to do something or walk to engineering to touch a specific dedicated panel that my fingers have already memorized" is maybe just a reflection that in Star Trek's future humans are still, you know, human.
