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iOS 18 Hints At A Buttonless Future For iPhone 16, Improved Battery On The Horizon
(www.ibtimes.co.uk)
this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2024
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I mean, this is about replacing “buttons” with “solid state buttons”. There’s no indication that a solid state button has a higher failure rate than normal buttons, and you already have cases where normal buttons break and the phone cannot be recovered.
This is like complaining that they moved to OLED because LED screens are used to convey information… it’s essentially doing the exact same thing.
That’s not exactly the concern: solid state buttons should be more reliable. The concern is that if something happens, like a bug or failed update, where the only hope of recovery is to reset it, you’re depending on buttons controlled by the same software that’s already broken.
In theory, mechanical buttons continue to work, regardless of the OS or drivers being locked up, so you can still recover
You’re assuming solid state buttons are completely reliant on software to run, but there’s no reason that has to be the case. Sure, for advanced stuff like “is a finger swiping across this” I agree you need software, but I doubt it’s impossible to use as binary input. “Is a finger touching this” isn’t hard when you have a little piece of hardware in there that sends out a signal when it’s being touched.
I read elsewhere that they had implementarion issues, anyway they are really hard to handle because of their feedback mechanism thus easy to accidentally press. It seems that the only benefit are looks and durability at the cost of repairability, ease of use and cost.