I think that a poorly engineered power button (one which can become inoperative if the OS freezes) is a terrible idea, but the mere concept of haptic buttons has been pretty well proven.
And I say that as an Apple critic. I've had enough power buttons fail on Android phones that this would actually add a point to the "pros" column (though still not enough to outweigh the "cons" column).
And a standard “clicky” button that physically fails after a few years use is better? I have seen more than one old iPhone with the accessibility icon on screen, because the physical hardware of the button has failed. Even worse: buttons that go intermittent failure on you - grrrrr.
Disclaimer: I dislike the haptic home button on my SE 2022, so I am somewhat on both sides of the argument. Good engineering is good compromises.
I had a horrible time teaching my grandparents to use the gesture navigation on their new iPad (they still hate it, they still get regularly anxious because they can't reliably make the "home" gesture instead of clear feedback of a hardware button and there's many gestures they accidentally trigger which cannot be disabled in A11y or MDM settings) - but they saved money and made it cool.
It'll be the same with phones as it is with cars - it's cheaper to provide shitty experience. And it's not like you can go anywhere, Apple owns your data and ecosystem now. So we'll just make do with crappier things to allow the manufacturer to extract more money, like we have to make do with crappier products on other markets.
It’s not about money—we’re talking about pennies here. The Pro series iPhones start at $999.
It’s always been an Apple thing to get rid of as many buttons, ports and cables as possible.
Unlike other smartphones, the iPhone never had a physical keyboard or SD card slots. In the US, new iPhones no longer have SIM slots, only eSIM.
So we shouldn’t be surprised that they may remove the physical buttons—but it should also mean additional functionality of some kind.
And companies will absolutely build a crappier product for you to save on manufacturing time. You're talking about a company that led the field by removing a headphone jack to make their manufacturing easier.
95 million * a few pennies is still $950,000 at least.
As long as that number is more than the salary of the person who was hired to make that button go away, in Apple's eyes that's good news.
You just have to repeat this mentality over the entire ecosystem to get to a trillion: a button removed here, a port removed there, year after year...
I'm not even convinced there would be a cost saving when you take into account buttons failing and needing to be replaced.
Reducing the number of buttons and replacing them with on screen-only (say move to on screen-only volume) would be a clear cost saving. But also a massive UX disaster that they wouldn't do.
Those buttons require special drilling and machining steps on the case. Removing those speeds up the production of cases by a lot which equals cost.
Mechanical switches are way more expensive than huge areas of silicon chip. It's not even close.
Finally, solid-state touch sensitive stuff effectively never fails. It never gets dirty. It never wears out.
Does it have Heisenbugs and screwball failure modes? Oh, yeah. I imagine triggering them with gloves on will be a nightmare, for example.
But, it's okay, people will wear special Apple gloves in order to use the advanced feature of their new phone. When something on an iPhone fails, it's obviously always the fault of the end user, no?
But, seeing my parents get anxious with their new ipad because they cannot reliably go back to the home screen, their "safe" environment, it makes me sad.
A pro tip from your fellow young(er) person, enable AssistiveTouch [0] and at least give them an obvious button to press. My parents are very happy with it.
Probably it doesn't actually. I assume the reason is actually waterproofing and one less physical thing to wear out or break -- so it's for reliability. It probably actually costs more to do, but saves the user money in repairs/replacement.
But that's probably not an option for apple.
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I move to a iPhone 13 mini from iPhone SE 1st and the lack of a home button is the singles most stupid thing in the world....
Replacing the home button was exceedingly common back when it was a button, and people had to either get a new phone or pay to have it fixed when it broke.
This was especially the case for the MacBook trackpad before it was made solid-state as well. That was not a cheap component to fix.
I wish every phone had at least four custom physical buttons, two for each side.
https://forum.xda-developers.com/t/app-8-0-skip-track-by-vol...
And the obvious benefit here is better waterproofing and one less physical mechanism to break.
I really don't understand the author's complaint. I think this ship sailed years ago and it's proven to be a non-issue.
Touch ID is significantly better than Face ID. Way less false positives. Way less false failures that force you to enter your passcode. You can use it in the dark. You can use it in your pocket. I ditched my iPad Pro for an iPad Air specifically because it has Touch ID rather than Face ID>
Want to exit the app? Tap the home button. Select an app? Double tap?
What's wrong with swiping up? Where you swipe from varies depending on the orientation of the app. That may not always be obvious. With a photo for example. Is it oriented a way because of the phone's rotation when it was taken or because of the phone's rotation now? The gesture to get to app selection is super awkward (ie swipe up-right-up). It's so awkward.
Why can't apple put Touch ID on the back? Or on the sides? Why can't they have a physical home button (even one of the haptic feedback buttons) on the back?
Losing the home button is such a UX fail.
I still have last iPhone SE and I love the home button. (it's not my daily driver).
I also had oneplus 3 with very similar home button and genius fingerprint reader. I was able to unlock my phone with index finger without having to lift it up in any way from eh desk and quickly glimpse on the content.
no i switched to new Samsung with has optic under display one and its just an utter failure. very often it can't read the fingerprint and... its location is not tahr obvious before slightly lighting the screen.
with OP3 Or iPhone SE i can find that button without hassle even in the dark.
You can use Face ID in the dark.
Yes, please!
iPhone 13 is my first one without Touch ID since 5S back in 2013. I hate Face ID, and the additions within the past year to accommodate masks and glasses only help a little.
I also have an inexpensive Android phone, a year older than the 13, with a touch ID sensor on the back. Why can't Apple do the same with iPhone?
It already has for certain iPad models, and rumors were it was coming to the iPhone SE 4 but that's delayed now (if not cancelled). But it's likely it will come to whatever budget successor phone Apple reveals next.
1. It will make rugged cases hard to do, probably involving conductive rubber, and extra types of materials add cost. I guess they'll have to have a cutout, and sticking your finger in the touchy side hole might be not be as nice as the designers who probably think caseless phones are a sane idea want it to be.
2. Holding real power buttons for is how you hard power cycle things.
1 can be fixed if people just kind of get used to a shallow hole as the new definition of a button, 2 can't really be fixed unless you want water to accidentally reboot your phone, or your sensing is really amazing.
If they make the sensing good enough, and case designers make it work without compromising ruggedness, I'm fine with it, as long as the implementation is good by the time it comes for us Androiders. But i don't see how unless you're doing some kind of optical sensing or something.
Apple has been building for this reality for years (see: camera hardware that juts out). This is just the next iteration.
And, yes, it sucks to be in the 20% as an Apple customer. They always design for the 80%.
[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/368627/us-protective-cas...
I have always had a case on all my Android phones, and none of them blocked any of the buttons. I use buttons all the time, with a case on my phone.
So whether there’s a perfectly tuned click response from a physical mechanism or just haptics under the layer of plastic is kind of irrelevant.
This might be a money saving move.
Just think of how many times you've waited in irritation and frustration for your inkjet printer to stop mucking about and preening itself before it starts printing. Right, it's a damn pain. (Please don't tell me that this wait is necessary because it just isn't.) Same goes for operating systems that have to be shut down and rebooted whenever certain changes are made.
For years I've advocated that software and computer science courses have compulsory strands on ergonomics but I'm now of the opinion that this is not enough. We need to teach basic ergonomics at school so kids when they grow up don't sit around like stuffed dummies as now and accept without complaint the shit that software and hardware vendors regularly dish out but instead become forceful complainers who won't accept junk. At the same time designers would be aware that customers actually have needs and that usability ought to be a key part of design and not an afterthought or forgotten about altogether.
An important final point: designers and developers do not use equipment in the same way ordinary users do. For some peculiar reason this isn't obvious to them. This is the reason they need to be force fed ergonomics whether it's at school or as part of their university courses.
I don't see how they're any different from regular buttons ergonomics-wise.
The answer is so blatantly obvious I can't be bothered answering it. Did you actually read the article? There's a few clues therein.
Why assume the buttons will be capacitive? Pressure sensitive makes more sense to me.
Even a case fully covering the sides could have a bump in the right place, to serve as a target for the user and transmit force to the phone's force sensor.
Similarly, buttons have to be obvious and provide consistent tactile feedback. So often they do not.
It seems that when the membrane switch came into vogue some decades ago we forgot about the rules of ergonomics.
It's time we brought them back.
In iPhone 15 the missing button will be the feature. Some years later, say in iPhone 18, the re-introduced button will be the feature.
All that happened before with Apple devices. They took away the form factor of the original iPhone SE without replacement just to bring it back with the iPhone 13 Mini. Also they took away the ports of MacBooks to end up with an USB-C port only - and now - the latest 14" MacBooks reintrudice a wide range of ports as a.. can you guess?
However, the increased haptics and strain sensor costs are unlikely to be made up directly by button cost savings. It does make it much easier to seal the entire thing and it may reduce volume (more battery), or increase "functionality", but I think it is to some extent (as others have mentioned) it's really the final step in Steve Jobs long bitter personal war on the button.
Really, I worry more that there may be no way to reliably reset your phone once they remove the USB cable and everything is wireless.
With haptic side buttons, a 3rd party case couldn’t use plastic over the buttons (my iPhone SE 2022 case has molded button covers as part of the plastic surround).
Aside: Apple’s usability feels like it is going downhill. As a very recent Android -> iPhone convert, I keep bumping into obvious and serious usability flaws, even with my years of prior experience with an iPad. Watching my 80 year old mum trying to learn how to use an iPad was a real eye opener for usability and accessibility failures (weirdly enough, she used to use a Windows laptop a few years ago with less problems, probably due to familiarity).
I’m guessing Apple can make a haptic button that is more reliable and more waterproof than a physically clicky button. We all know of old iPhones with a physical home button where the home button stopped working reliable (or at all). Preventing failure in objects that physically move is very difficult.
Surely Apple will implement volume buttons that respond to pressure, like those do, rather than capacitance, like the iPhone home button.
And so a 3rd party case that covers the buttons would still work just fine.
With this change they might actually get around to implementing a (software defined) shutter button.
The Watch crown also feels good.
I do agree that the haptic Home button on my iPhone 8 (I keep it for testing) feels weird and wimpy, but I suspect the reason why, is their obsession with thin.
It's entirely possible to make haptics feel exactly like analog controls, but their behavior is software-defined, and can be odd as hell.
If the software around it wasn't so useless second-layer clicks would be really cool too.
> But since reports have been surfacing for a while now that [...].
Well, what about it? You cannot start a sentence with "But since" and not offer a what it means.
Configurable in Settings > General > Use Side Switch To
Its always the same cycle, mock apple, then copy them. It happened with aux, the charger and it will happen again with this, they are just dumb.
