Apple's Next Year iPhone Won't Have the Home Button: NYTimes

The reviews for the Apple's new iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus are live today. The New York Times, for instance, has given the smartphone a fairly positive review. However, in the story, the reporter says that the company's next flagship iPhone won't have the home button (Editor's note: the link could be paywalled; here's an alternate source). Instead, the display will serve the purpose of the home button as well, the report added. From the report:Apple is likely to continue making iPhones without headphone jacks, and next year's iPhone will have a full-screen face with the virtual button built directly into the screen, according to two people at the company who spoke on condition of anonymity because the product details are private.

Comments

Gimme Wireless charging as well

[bigdady92]

and they can close off all the ports completely. let me take the phone under water and all that hoopla about removing the jack will be worth it.

Re:Gimme Wireless charging as well

[tripleevenfall]

Yes, while having a headphone jack, home button, and a charging port are all convenient - you can use any headphones in the world. the headphones don't run out of batteries, you don't need to carry a dongle around, the home button gives you a tactile button to wake the phone or check the screen or determine orientation when you can't look at it, and the charging port allows much faster charging than wireless - who wants everything to work as well as it could?

Yes, we should eliminate all those things which are working great, so there are no ports, because... reasons

Re:Gimme Wireless charging as well

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple removed a component which is arguably obsolete from the iPhone, while providing an acceptable workaround, for free. This earth shattering change only requires you to carry an extra adaptor to retain the functionality that you already enjoy. This is the kind of problem that decidedly falls into the "first world problem" category. Your life, though slightly inconvenienced (and even this notion is questionable), carries on.

Samsung, on the other hand, released one of their primary products (and best seller) with a flaw that can actually kill or severely injure the user. This flaw isn't exactly the kind of thing that wouldn't be noticed by Samsung during testing (You test your shit, right Samsung?), but I guess Samsung is taking a leaf out of the Volkswagen playbook, and pretended that phones suddenly catching fire wouldn't be noticed.

And then we have the utter disaster that is the Android ecosystem: devices exploitable by MMS, malware that routinely enters the Play store and infects millions of devices, Google's inability to allow users to update their devices despite the fact that pretty much every OS allows you to do this, regardless of the underlying hardware, the constant UI redesigns. The list goes on and on.

Perspective. Get some.

Interesting - let's see what happens

[ErichTheRed]

I wonder if the other hardware switches are going away as well. If so, I also wonder whether there'll at least be a "paperclip hole" to reboot the thing if it locks up. As much as I'm not a fan of killing useful functionality just because Jony Ive says I don't need it anymore, how they implement this will be the interesting detail. If it were Google or Microsoft, I'd say this would be a good way to ensure the device is on in a low-power state perpetually broadcasting its location and usage data. So far Apple seems to have resisted a lot of this data mining stuff...we'll see.

As a lesson from another industry, Ford removed most of the physical knobs and switches from their cars when they first introduced MyFordTouch. Owners freaked out when the touch screen wasn't as responsive as they'd hoped, and some of the switches have come back over time. Altering consumer behavior can be very difficult even if your consumers are rabid fans who think you can do no wrong. :-)

Re:Interesting - let's see what happens

[Merk42]

As a lesson from another industry, Ford removed most of the physical knobs and switches from their cars when they first introduced MyFordTouch. Owners freaked out when the touch screen wasn't as responsive as they'd hoped, and some of the switches have come back over time

The issue with MyFordTouch is that drivers couldn't find the buttons without looking away from the road.

Aesthetics Usability

[Anonymous Coward]

They're off the deep end of form over function.

fuck the blind people

[Anonymous Coward]

Nobody cares about the blind egh ?

Re:the samsung fires may force an battery kill swi

[Jason Levine]

I was wondering if the Samsung fires might result in the return of user replaceable batteries. If the batteries in the Note 7 were user replaceable, people could have turned off their phones, waited for replacement batteries, and gotten those installed (or installed them themselves). Data loss would be zero and the inconvenience to the user would be minimized. Instead, the entire phone needs to be replaced which maximizes possible data loss and inconvenience.