MJG33

It's worth noting that Logitech acquired Loupedeck last year.

cbtech71 said:

I disagree. Overall I wasn't impressed with the event, but this was definitely not a complete dud. If fact, I've seen more positive comments around that sketch than the rest of the event. Did they beat the sh$t out of the carbon neutral phrase the whole event?  Yes!  But the sketch was pretty good for what it was. 

Agreed. The rest of the event was the same old product announcements -- and there wasn't even anything that exciting this time -- so at least they inserted something new and interesting to contrast the trudge through minor features being talked up.  

P.S. Their efforts to go carbon neutral costs them a lot of money to implement so they want to get their marketing mileage out of selling it to the masses...

To clarify (and as one other person pointed out), most Mazdas have touchscreens and you could use touch for CarPlay when the car isn't moving.  It's when moving that the touch would lock out in favor of the jog wheel.  There was benefit to encouraging the knob for reasons like MplsP said with his Audi but I think it's the right move to no longer require the knob when moving.

lkrupp said:

Wait. What? Could one of resident trolls please explain this? Doesn’t the iPhone use the same Qualcomm 5G modems as Samsung and Pixel. Are the Apple Silicon SOCs that much better? Does Android suck? What’s goin on here?

Likely a combination of antenna design, noise control in the board and amplifier designs, software, etc.

I think another aspect of this that is being missed in the article and comments is this could be partly playing to the EU as well. This year, the EU voted to force phone manufacturers to have a common charger standard to avoid the increasing e-waste of chargers. Apple fought it along with other tech companies and wanted the Lightning port to be included as one of the “standard” charger ports allowed instead of having to move to USB-C (or aging micro USB).