- cross-posted to:
- technology
- cross-posted to:
- technology
The latest iOS 18 update strongly hints that Apple’s forthcoming iPhone 16 lineup might incorporate the highly anticipated solid-state buttons.
Unveiled at the recent WWDC, iOS 18 includes a much-discussed “hide and lock apps” feature that some worry could be misused for privacy concerns related to infidelity. Among its other noteworthy additions are many AI features and several notable improvements, including enhanced visual effects.
People seem to hate on this for one reason or another, but I think it’s great if done well. It’s not actually “buttonless”, it will still have a frame with shapes for something looking like a button, it just won’t physically move when pressed. If they make it work as good as their trackpads (which are the best trackpads out there no contest imo) or similar to the solid state home button the iPhone 7, 8, SE2 and SE3 have, I’d say it’s better than actual physically moving buttons: the button will feel consistent between devices of the same model (you can get slightly different feeling physical buttons between the same iPhone model or also another manufacturer’s phone model because of tolerances), it could be configurable (sensitivity and feedback, like you were able to configure the home button starting with the iPhone 7), it makes the frame more rigid, solid state buttons basically never break, they could have different actions at different pressure levels (with feedback to match) etc.
My one concern is, what do I do if the phone freezes up?
With physical buttons there is a hardware bypass so I can force the phone to reset.
With a “trackpad” I’m not as confident it will register those touches correctly when the OS has seized up.
I’m assuming they’ll have something figured out at the hardware level, but I’m curious what that will be.
Just take out the battery, oh wait.
I assume it wouldn’t be too different from how it works now. On phones without a home button, you press volume up, volume down and then hold down the side button. This forces a reset even if iOS completely froze/crashed. Now this same low-level interrupt (or whatever is actually happening, I’m not sure) works with solid state buttons instead. I don’t see the problem. It’s not like the current side button physically cuts the power if you hold it down for 5 seconds, there is some low-level firmware running that listens for that key combo and then resets the SoC.
Come on, I know many people in the Fediverse dislike Apple, but do you actually think they’d not think about that…? This would blow in the press up a few weeks after launch and Apple surely wouldn’t want that.
I feel like this might be one of those things where people are like “oh this is bad” but then >99.9% of the people actually using it are completely fine with it and all the issues people talked about beforehand like resetting when the OS froze will be non-issues because it’ll work just like it did before.
I think I was thrown off by the “trackpad” example that was given above. That would have been a bit more complex than just a simple button press (which is still doable in low level firmware) but I was curious how they would pull it off.
I looked up what “solid state buttons” are and it makes a lot more sense now. This isn’t like some trackpad you can swipe along the endge, they’re still buttons in separate locations, just not in the mechanical clicking sense that we’re used to.
I just like the sensory feedback of feeling buttons clicking downwards. I’ve used solid state buttons before and while they’re far better than pure touch control “buttons,” they still don’t feel like real buttons to me. Haptics help the illusion, for sure, but it can’t match the analog feeling perfectly.
And like the other comment said, how do they get around frozen software and being able to use the buttons to force power cycle a device? Unless the buttons have a completely separate controller outside of the OS?
Apple’s solid state trackpads are downright eerie. It feels so damn weird when they’re turned off. It feels like they should physically move, but they don’t.