Everyone who did all that human factors research at NASA back before glass cockpits were perfected must just see the picture of the two iPads and weep.
/rant The world has collectively decided to become completely deranged about UX and UI. The entire field was typified by terms such as human factors, haptics research, disambiguation and human-machine interface design, ergonomics, accessibility, etc. Then came the iPod age, somewhere between 2003-2007, we decided to chuck it all out. BAM! Web 2.0 has arrived. Engineers were given a cold shoulder as new UX/UI teams started assembling in corporations. All went loose. Internet was getting commercialized and extremely profitable (Gartner's plateau of productivity has arrived after the peak of delusion in 2001). Therein came glorified aestheticians with fancy titles imploring everyone to shift to open office plans. They got rid of borders and frames, negative space became the common driving force to appease the marketing targets for "Luxury" user experiences. You see, just how Louis Vuitton stores have lots of negative space and more people employed than necessary, designers decided that we outta fake the luxury appeal to our UX/UI patterns - here comes minimalism. The catch all do all luxurification technique for someone with an Adobe Creative Cloud subscription. The whole machine prints money like there is no tomorrow. Hordes and hordes of sheep-like humans consume extra large typography and hamburger menus, massive JS apps were hand crafted with animation libraries to woo the sheep. Touchscreens (for cost reasons) were used to brainwash the customers into thinking its cool while bean counters raked in their bonuses for reducing the COGS by 40%. Look! Get rid of all these knobs, buttons, sliders and encoders - replace it all with this magical touchscreens. Ship broken software and we'll just patch it later. The funny thing is there are many great designers out there, but the market has no place for them.
At this point, if we go to Mars, I'd like to be incharge and a gatekeeper for UX/UI. It is not possible to fix the world as it is here on Earth.
I see that picture and think how great it would be to have a more rugged connector to those two iPads. I can imagine that those connectors will need some ruggedizing.
