Apple has long been famous for its bravery—or, in the words of Apple
executive Phil Schiller, courage, which he famously used to describe
Apple's decision to "move on and do something new that betters all of us"
by removing the headphone jack from the iPhone 7.
It was hardly Apple's first couragous act. It took courage to release the
MacBook Air, a computer so thin it could house only two USB ports. It took
courage to remove the iPhone's multifunctional home button. It took courage
to start selling Earpods that only worked with the iPhone's proprietary
lightning cable once the headphone jack was gone, and it took even more
courage to sell some pricey new Bluetooth headphones at the same time. It
took courage to release a MacBook with a keyboard so bad it clearly played
second fiddle to making the design just a touch thinner (and cost the
company $50 million in a class action lawsuit). It took courage to finally
update the iPhone to USB-C—and then saddle it with USB 2.0 transfer speeds
from, literally, the year 2000.
But y'know, it also takes courage to admit when you're wrong. And while
Apple didn't say it was wrong while unveiling its new iPhones this
year—admitting you ever made a mistake with a past product is not a very
Big Tech thing to do—that's actually the message I took away from Monday's
iPhone 16 presentation. After spending years patting itself on the back for
the trend of removing basic hardware functionality in the name of pushing
people to new products and more svelte designs, Apple's tactily changed
strategies.
We're now in Apple's "buttons and ports are good, actually" era.
This new, throwback-to-the-old-ways Apple wasn't just born today, but I
think the iPhone 16 reveal event did crystallize what has been a notable
Apple trend forming for the last few years. The big new thing is this: the
iPhone 16 has not one but two new physical buttons on it that last year's
phone didn't have. One of them is the "action button," brought over from
the iPhone 15 Pro. This is just a great button: you can map a range of
functions to it, so you finally get to decide what it does instead of being
stuck to whatever Apple thinks you'd use a physical button for the most.
When a phone is in your pocket or you want something you can press without
looking at the screen, it sure is nice to have a physical button!
The other button, even more exciting, is the "camera control" button, which
offers capactive feedback meant to somewhat mimic the experience of using a
real camera shutter. You click it to open the camera or take a photo, but
can also do a light press or double-tap to swap between camera settings
before snapping a pic. That sounds pretty great to me, considering how
often I feel like I'm awkwardly holding the camera with one hand while
trying to use the other to slide my finger on the touchscreen adjusting
zoom or exposure.
This move towards dedicated physical buttons feels to me like a complete
reversal from the years of the iPhone 7 (when Apple ditched the headphone
jack) and the iPhone X (when it ditched the home button), which were both
watershed moments for the iPhone. For a few years in between the iPhone
design has been more iterative, but now, it seems, the iPhone is worthy of
physical controls again, without everything being shunted onto the same
poor overworked power and volume buttons.
https://www.pcgamer.com/hardware/7-years-after-declaring-it-took-courage-to-remove-the-iphones-headphone-jack-apple-has-finally-decided-buttons-and-ports-are-cool-again/
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