* Physical shower controls themselves. The typical US single-handle shower control is awful. Maybe I'm stupid, but it's never intuitive to me which side is hot and which side is cold. Much of the time the handle is pointing down, so you have to visualize an arrow extending through the top of the control, pointing left (hot) when the handle is on the bottom right. Sometimes they point entirely different directions, or the rotational positions of off, cold, hot make no sense at all. As I write this, it occurs to me that it's probably obvious that cold is always closest to "off", and "full on" is always full hot, but I'm over 40 and this has never occurred to me until now, so it can't be just me. Anyway, for whatever reason, when they're not labeled, i've never been able to 'remember' which side is hot and which side is cold. Again, maybe it's just me, but I've never had any other such dyslexic tendencies outside of faucet control. I think in my head "C" is on the left because it places C and H in alphabetical order?

* Tankless hot water heaters. I want to like them. I've had them in my last 2 houses, covering the past 12 years. I can't imagine buying a water heater with a tank, but... The (central) tankless heaters take 15 seconds to turn on, and the water takes forever to make its way across my tiny house. So much water and time is wasted. And they shut off after some minimum flow rate. So if you try to use 'too little' hot mix (hot water heater set 'too high' or cold water input too warm, say, in the summer), the water heater decides to click off.. which you only notice 20 seconds later as the hot water trickles out of the pipes, and now you have to wash, rinse, repeat the whole awful cycle of turning the handle to full hot, waiting for hot water again, turning it down, but hoping you didn't turn it down too far. I've turned the hot water heater down as low as it'll go without much noticeable difference in this behavior in either house. Perhaps because the minimum flow rate actually depends on the setpoint of the hot water, which would make sense. It's worse in the summer. It's only a problem I have in 10% of my showers, but it drives me nuts.

And don't forget the fixed shower heads

Every tub/shower fixture in the apartments I've lived in and all the hotels I've visited since has been different. They have all replaced this simple arrangement with some godawful thing that tries to combine the two variables of "amount of hot water" and "amount of cold water" into one knob/lever/dial/whatever. Usually with absolutely no markings. It takes an annoying amount of time to figure these out the first time and sometimes they remain annoying forever - the one in my current apartment is mounted at a weird angle, so "off" is slightly to the right of pointing the handle straight down; maximum hot water is somewhere below pointing straight right, and pointing straight right is cold. Pointing straight down is an annoying, chilly trickle.

Every time I take a shower I miss the simplicity of two knobs, clearly marked.

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The humble handlebar-mounted bicycle gear shift. So much more pleasant than reaching down to a little lever mounted on the frame like I did before these became standard on even the cheapest bikes. Just move my hand over on the handlebar a little, grab, and twist: there's a little resistance, then a distinct click as it moves to the next spot, which changes the tension in the cable and makes the derailleur do its job of moving the chain from one gear to another. It is not perfect, but its failure modes are much more prone to "a little out of alignment and now you skip over a gear or two in the middle" than "it's super easy to shift the chain off the gears entirely". People have come up with other ways to alter the gear ratio between the crank and the wheel but they are all much more complex and power-hungry than the grip-shifter and derailleur combination.

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If you want a specific brand and model of thing, my Tom Binh "Pilot" bag is really nice. Durable, reasonably cute, carries my computer and everything I need for a day going out to cafes to work, with enough room for a change of clothes or two if I stuff it tightly. Has some nice touches like a pocket in the center with a drain hole for a water bottle or a compact umbrella, and a pocket in the back that unzips on the bottom so you can empty it and slide it over the extended handle of your big rolling bag when traveling. I've had it for like half a decade and it's been my main bag for a lot of that time. https://www.tombihn.com/collections/travel-bags/products/pil...

I used to have a shower that didn't have a thermostat so it was fiddly to get the temperature right. That one I'd lean in and out, sure.

One issue the author overlooks is that we have minimal control over the temperature of the cold water, and this temperature fluctuates throughout the year (at least here in NY, not so much where I lived in SF). As a result, the range of the dial I use changes from summer to winter. There are hot parts of the dial I use everyday in the winter that would simply burn me if I used them in the summer.

Temperature can even change during the course of the shower! I notice this mostly in the winter. I speculate this is due to the cold water in my building pipes being used up and then replaced by the truly cold water from underground. I once tried to shower with that icy water when the hot water went out (just before a big trip) and I managed to completely numb my lower body (I did not have the fortitude to try and shower my upper body too).

It's not that simple. Hot water temperature varies greatly from one home to another. Cold water temperature varies tremendously from summer to winter. Take a picture of your shower control for the same water temperature in winter or in summer. You will see it's not turned at the same angle, because in winter you need a lot more hot water to balance the ice cold water from outside (especially if you live in the country, it will be ice cold, trust me). As a consequence, the part of your shower control that you call "confort zone" can be almost 100% too hot or 100% too cold in another home or in another season.

I've seen the thermostatic faucets before (I assume those're the ones where you twist to adjust temperature & pull to adjust pressure). They show up in more modern upscale hotels, and in people's homes when they've remodeled their bathroom. I think they tend to be an aftermarket add-on rather than a typical part of construction, though - no idea why, they're much more convenient than the alternatives.

Adding proportional control isn't too hard. Certainly an easy option would be actuating the valve electronically and just using an encoder in the knob to control it digitally. There are a lot of advantages to this, such as being able to automatically comp for actual water temperatures and customizing settings for personal preference, but it's understandable that people might feel uneasy about a cheap electronic device in close proximity to the water they are in. I'd point out that this hasn't stopped us from putting things like lights in our showers which by necessity draw much more power, but some may still be concerned. More likely it is the lack of experience with electronics that valve manufacturers and plumbers have that make them hesitant to change.

For a mechanical solution, you could transmit the torque via a gearbox instead of a direct shaft. Switch gears to get higher or lower resolution control. You can even have a single set of gears with variable diameter sections to have higher precision in a fixed subsection of the range. Unfortunately this would not allow for easy adjustment for an individual installation, nonetheless different people using the same shower. The increase in manufacturing cost and installation complexity would probably not be huge, but in such a high competition commodity market it would be noticeable.

But solving the real issue, a lack of fine control in the important range, is actually much easier to solve. Just make the handle on the knob longer/larger diameter. Especially if you just want to modify an existing installation, attaching an 18 inch handle onto the existing knob is something just about anyone could do in a few minutes. For precise control, grip it on the outside, for fast large changes, choke up on it. For the OEM, a design with a long handle is pennies more expensive to produce at scale, easily justified for even a very small competitive advantage. Maybe some people really like the aesthetics of a small handle, but I've never once heard someone complain a shower handle was too big. I still think the electronic controller option is better, as you can deal with other shower temperature control problems like the long heat up times of the pipes and the variable ideal water temperature at different points in the shower, but the perfect can be the enemy of the good enough. Frankly it's just weird that I can't seem to find a shower handle longer than about 6 inches available for sale right now in a quick google search.

I don't picture the controls on the other side of a big, tub, just somewhere that they can always be reached. Is there a "better" shower design out there? Voice controlled temp? :-)

So while with my setup I press a button and (sans hot water reaching the shower time) I always get the same temperature, dialing around to get that temperature is still fairly annoying.

For some reason, the style fell out of favor. Not even to high-tech showers, just to single axis systems which blast water at high heat and trickle it for cold.

This sort of thing really is a usability failure, providing a slightly cheaper and simpler product for the median consumer while harming anyone with vaguely non-standard intentions.