Tesla's hardware certainly is minimalistic though, and hence the Apple analogy. The software inside an iPhone is ferociously complicated, but the slab of glass, no buttons form factor is much simpler than the Nokias etc it replaced.
The difference is that Tesla's hardware is simpler in a way that's harder to use. Moving from indirect control to touch screens was great and intuitive for phones. Moving to touch screens in cars is more about cost savings than making them easy to use.
If a touchscreen was the ideal way to interact with a car, why aren't acceleration and braking done through the touch screen? Why isn't steering on the touch screen?
> Moving from indirect control to touch screens was great and intuitive for phones
This isn't even necessarily true for phones. Back when I got the early iPhone and iPad for my parents, one thing that they loved about it is the physical Home button - because, no matter where you were in the UI, even if you ended up "lost" (e.g. by accidentally fullscreening some app), you could always escape to a familiar place by pressing that obvious button.
Fast forward a few years, and it all gets replaced by completely unintuitive swipes. They were not happy, to put it mildly.
You accelerate, brake, indicate etc all the time, so you need tactile controls for those functions, and Teslas do. But how do you find a Spotify playlist, adjust how you're notified if you exceed the speed limit and the margin you want, or check tire pressure readings with tactile controls?
You can argue that this gets too unwieldy once the UI gets more complicated. But if the UI is too complicated to be navigable with arrow keys, I would say that it's too complicated for a dashboard of a fast moving vehicle.
FWIW touch itself is not really a problem. Sometimes it is indeed more convenient. But when you can only e.g. adjust volume using touch, that becomes much more difficult to do while driving. Same thing goes for navigation and other such things. A good dashboard UX will let you do this using both touch and dedicated physical buttons.
