When the iPhone 6s (do you like how I italicized that) launched, it included 3D Touch. You could press harder on the screen, and it would function like a right click menu. For some things, you could then press even harder to trigger a secondary action, for example, press hard on a link for a preview, then without lifting your finger, press harder to open it. What a handy feature!
When iOS 13 was released, Apple removed 3D touch, and replaced it with haptic touch, a similar but completely different feature. When the iPhone XR was announced, they removed the 3D touch hardware completely. Haptic touch would be similar to 3D touch, except you just long press on something for a menu. The second part of the gesture was completely removed, as strength was no longer taken into effect, so it would be impossible to tell. The reason it was removed was to cut costs, as most people didn't use the feature as pressing harder on the screen isn't something people usually do.
3D touch would remain on the Apple Watch (i'm done using italics, sorry), under the name Force touch. Well, until WatchOS 7, where it was removed from there too. This marked the end of 3D touch, I think. Once someone asked me if I thought the version on the Mac would be removed. I've never used a Macbook, I didn't know it had that. I don't know if it actually does have force touch. But anyway, this was the end of 3D touch, for now.
When the iPhone 15 was released, they replaced the silent mode switch with an action button that you could program to do whatever. I didn't like this, I liked the switch. The switch was a fun thing to fidget with. They could of just let you changed what it toggled instead, but whatever. You could use Siri shortcuts with it, so some people built complex menus that did a lot of things, defeating the point of having a button that gives you access to a quick shortcut. Do you really use features so often that you need a 3 level hierarchy menu assigned to a button? Anyway, I'm willing to bet that most people just have this set to flashlight or silent mode, because that's the default, and most people don't care. However I'm just making that stat up. Hurrah ("horray" is better) for customization, I guess.
One thing you could do with the action button was have it open the camera, and then you could use it as a physical shutter button. Kinda stupid, as the volume buttons already function as shutter buttons, but who am I to judge?
So anyway, the design team over at Apple decided to get back to work designing the next iPhone. A lot of complaints have started coming up saying that all the new iPhones look exactly the same, and nothing has changed about them. So, Apple wanted to make a physical change (other than titanium). A new, physical feature.
Our first tease of this new button was in the iOS 18 developer beta. When you pressed a physical button on the screen, a button press effect would be shown on the screen. This promo image does a good job at showcasing it:
Some people probably love this effect, I think it's whatever, but it gets really annoying when changing your volume. The effect only lasts for a split second, and the volume bar moves out of the way for the effect, creating too much motion. Here's a video:
A lot of people thought this was teasing soft buttons or whatever, where the phone has no physical buttons and you just hard press where the buttons would be. To people who actually want this, what is wrong with you? Do you get excited when they remove buttons from cars and put them on the screen? Have you ever considered anything but aesthetics? You could die right now and nobody would feel sorry for you.
So anyways Apple added a shutter button to the iPhone 16!
%% I realized those last two sentences would of worked better as a YouTube video script, and I'm forcing a paragraph break just to write this comment. What am I doing? %%
But it does more than just take a picture. You can control the camera almost entirely with just this button! You don't even need to tap the screen anymore! And you can press the button at any time to quickly open the camera. This is going to be a revolution! And it even looks like the phone has a second notch (ignore the fact they got rid of the notch a few years ago). Steve Jobs is back!
Remember how I brought up 3D touch at the start of this article, and how it was removed due to not being discoverable by the average user? Well 3D touch is back! This little button does more than just take pictures. Here's a list of everything you can do with it currently:
- Single click it to open the camera app
- Click when in the camera to take a picture
- Click and hold to record a video (if you let go, the video ends)
- Lightly press it to open the menu where you can change controls
- Slide to adjust controls such as zooming
- Lightly double press to select a different control
Wow, it does so much! But that's the problem. You could do all of these things before, this doesn't solve anything. How are you expecting the average person to know and remember all of this? Why would I want to use this instead of just tapping the screen? And if I needed a shutter button, I could always press one of the volume buttons. How do you remove 3D touch and then add this a few years later?
Also, that list is just what the button currently does. In the future, clicking and holding the button (huh?) will activate Apple Awesome Visual AI Search 3000 (formerly known as Google Lens (formerly known as Google Goggles)). Wow! The people are going to love it. Aaaand it looks like they (3 random people on Reddit) just wish it had Touch ID instead. Oh well. Better luck next year.
The final, awesome thing about this stupid button is that it has confused case makers. With physical buttons, case makers could just make buttons on the case that press the actual buttons. But with this weird screen thing, they can't do that. So a lot of cases just don't have case where the button is, looking weird and probably making the phone more susceptible to damages.
At least this button looks cool in the promo images.