iPhone 7 Home Button Now Requires Skin Contact To Work (todaysiphone.com)

Gone are the days of pressing the home button of your iPhone with an inanimate object. With the new iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus, the home button can only be activated when in contact with skin. TodaysiPhone reports: The new "solid-state" Home button found in the new iPhone 7 and 7 Plus appears to require skin contact to function. As the season gets colder, and as people put gloves on, users will quickly realize that attempting to unlock the iPhone with said gloves or with a sleeve of a shirt over your finger will not work. And with the new lock screen in iOS 10, there's no way to bring up the passcode screen without pressing the Home button. Tests have shown that using gloves designed for touch screens will get an iPhone 6s Plus to unlock but not an iPhone 7 Plus. As most of us know, the Home button in the iPhone 7 is no longer a physical button -- it sits flush and uses the iPhone's haptic feedback to give the sensation of a button press. Because the button requires skin contact, it's lead us to believe that the Home button on the iPhone 7 uses Touch ID to figure out if you're pressing the button. The report notes that Carl Hancock on Twitter was able to activate the Home button using gloves made to work specifically with touch screens. The reason (in a nutshell) why we cannot interact with the capacitive Home button when wearing gloves is because the gloves block the body's natural conductivity -- humans conduct electricity and Apple's new Home button (as well as most touch screens) has an electrical charge. On the flip side, the reason why the Home button registers our skin is because it distorts the screen's electrostatic field at the point of contact, thus triggering an action.

Comments

So?

[sexconker]

Considering that the fingerprint scanner and the screen already needed meat, what's the difference?
To unlock you need to use your fingerprint, a password, a pin/pattern, or a slide with some meaty appendage anyway, right?

Re:So?

[Gussington]

I'd say they were ideal solutions if not for the problem of water resistance.

Is this a problem? Samsung has waterproof phones with tactile buttons

Re:So?

[Anonymous Coward]

Stop being so lazy and just move to a warmer state you dumb fucks. Iphone its worth it.

Re:So?

[DarkVader]

Except it does work....

http://www.imore.com/iphone-7-...

First the 3.5 mm, now this?!

[Anonymous Coward]

Now I need to buy new headphones *and* new gloves?!

Re:First the 3.5 mm, now this?!

[Feyshtey]

If you can run out and be a good little consumer sheep and buy the brand new iPhone, you can afford headphones and gloves.

Apparently it's the price of inflating your ego. Or maybe a tax on vanity.

Designed in California

[Bruce66423]

Where it never gets cold...

The iphone can't be appeased with a mere offering.

[Z80a]

It demands an offering of human flesh to work!

Sausage Stylus!

[Greyfox]

I heard a story a while back that there was a town where the people use sausages to operate their cell phone when it gets too cold. Having spent the last 6 months working with a mobile test automation framework, I think it would be easier to build an Arduino-powered robot equipped with a sausage and a camera. A mobile-testing abomination, part meat, part machine! Because fuck, Apple sure doesn't make it easy to test on their shit! Naturally, you'd have to replace the sausage every so often, when your sausage robot starts getting smelly. That's just a design consideration, really.