By Hayley Tsukayama
When it comes to the next iPhone, it seems like, in many ways, iPhone users will have to do without. Apple is changing things up and continuing its long war on that most humble gadget component: the button.
Mark Gurman, who has an excellent track record when it comes to iPhone leaks, reports that the new iPhone will have a much different home button. Per the article: "[The] new models will have a pressure-sensitive button that provides feedback to the user via a vibrating haptic sensation rather than a true physical click, according to the people."
A home button that actually moves when you press it may soon be a thing of the past.
In other words, it will look like a button and feel like a button but it won't actually, you know, be a button.
Which, I have to admit, troubles me a little bit.
Some of it is psychological. Physical buttons and switches feel direct, and can make you feel like you have more control. If your touch screen is unresponsive, you know you can always hit the power button and the side button on an iPhone and physically reboot it.
On a broader level, the revamped home button could make Apple devices harder to repair. Several Apple consumers already complain about "planned obsolescence" — the idea that the firm makes things hard to repair so that it can make money off new hardware. It's a bit of a tinfoil hat way to look at things. But with no button at all and no easy way to get into a phone, we're likely to see even fewer ways for third-party businesses to be able to replace parts.
And not being able to replace parts could, in effect, shorten a gadget's life span.
Complicating the function of the home button has already had this negative effect for some Apple customers. This February, many people were upset that replacing Apple's home button made their phones inoperable. Apple explained this was to ensure that no one tampered with the button's built-in security features. That's a sensible explanation. But it still means that users have to go to Apple with their repair problems, and possibly get their whole phone replaced, thanks to the complications of the home button. This only stands to get worse if the rumours are true.
There are some general advantages, however, to ditching buttons, apart from aesthetics. One is that it gives you fewer places where outside debris such as sand, dirt, dust or water, could get in and wreak havoc with your devices. There has been, for example, a lot of pressure on Apple to make the iPhone more water-resistant. Fewer outside seams theoretically helps with that.
And software buttons aren't all bad, either. In other phones, we've seen Android manufacturers go further than what Apple's rumoured to be doing with the next iPhone and using software-only buttons with no physical spot on the phone to make screens bigger and free up screen space. The home, back and options buttons on a bar that hides at the bottom of the screen when not in use.
Apple's certainly shown it can design for software buttons with its pressure-sensitive Force Touch on the new MacBook and the iPhone's 3D Touch. That technology means Apple can offer more than one dimension of function even with a flat screen. In fact, the options from those technologies goes far beyond what a single button could ever do. If it's executed well and doesn't react every time something brushes against it — I'm looking at you, Xbox One power button — it's unlikely to detract much from the experience.
In fact, I only ever remember that my MacBook trackpad doesn't click when my computer's off. (Or, you know, when I'm writing an entire column about buttons.)
We all seemed to get used to losing the physical "call" and "end" buttons, or the physical snap of hanging up a flip phone. Given what's rumoured from Apple, this will be a far smaller compromise of physical sensation than that. But we may miss the button in other ways.
The Washington Post