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Comment by izacus | Hacker News Reader

I'm sure they'll do it since it saves money.

I had a horrible time teaching my grandparents to use the gesture navigation on their new iPad (they still hate it, they still get regularly anxious because they can't reliably make the "home" gesture instead of clear feedback of a hardware button and there's many gestures they accidentally trigger which cannot be disabled in A11y or MDM settings) - but they saved money and made it cool.

It'll be the same with phones as it is with cars - it's cheaper to provide shitty experience. And it's not like you can go anywhere, Apple owns your data and ecosystem now. So we'll just make do with crappier things to allow the manufacturer to extract more money, like we have to make do with crappier products on other markets.

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> I'm sure they'll do it since it saves money.

It’s not about money—we’re talking about pennies here. The Pro series iPhones start at $999.

It’s always been an Apple thing to get rid of as many buttons, ports and cables as possible.

Unlike other smartphones, the iPhone never had a physical keyboard or SD card slots. In the US, new iPhones no longer have SIM slots, only eSIM.

So we shouldn’t be surprised that they may remove the physical buttons—but it should also mean additional functionality of some kind.

When we're talking about saving money on hardware it's not just the cents on a part that matter - manufacturing time and complexity (do we need a robot for the button? a hole drilled? will it fail? does it has to be repairable? do we need an additional employee on a manufacturing line to install those buttons?) is a bigger weight than just the part itself.

And companies will absolutely build a crappier product for you to save on manufacturing time. You're talking about a company that led the field by removing a headphone jack to make their manufacturing easier.

assuming this number is true: 95 million + iphone 14 units https://www.zdnet.com/article/apple-orders-95-million-iphone...

95 million * a few pennies is still $950,000 at least.

As long as that number is more than the salary of the person who was hired to make that button go away, in Apple's eyes that's good news.

You just have to repeat this mentality over the entire ecosystem to get to a trillion: a button removed here, a port removed there, year after year...

> 95 million * a few pennies is still $950,000 at least. As long as that number is more than the salary of the person who was hired to make that button go away, in Apple's eyes that's good news.

While I appreciate how pedantic HNers can be, it’s meaningless because that’s not how Apple works.

Nobody at Apple is incentivized to shave pennies off the production cost of an iPhone.

This should be obvious in a world with plastic phones with off the shelf, generic components.

A multi-trillion dollar marketcap company doesn’t invest several billion dollars to create their own custom silicon to then change the design of their most profitable product to save a few insignificant cents.

Let’s be real here.

I'm not sure a touch sensitive button is a lower cost component than a physical button, you need an IC to drive a touch button. I can't see this being driven by cost savings.

I'm not even convinced there would be a cost saving when you take into account buttons failing and needing to be replaced.

Reducing the number of buttons and replacing them with on screen-only (say move to on screen-only volume) would be a clear cost saving. But also a massive UX disaster that they wouldn't do.

Removing anything "mechanical" is a huge cost saver and a massive reliability improver.

Those buttons require special drilling and machining steps on the case. Removing those speeds up the production of cases by a lot which equals cost.

Mechanical switches are way more expensive than huge areas of silicon chip. It's not even close.

Finally, solid-state touch sensitive stuff effectively never fails. It never gets dirty. It never wears out.

Does it have Heisenbugs and screwball failure modes? Oh, yeah. I imagine triggering them with gloves on will be a nightmare, for example.

But, it's okay, people will wear special Apple gloves in order to use the advanced feature of their new phone. When something on an iPhone fails, it's obviously always the fault of the end user, no?

I'm still not convinced, back when I worked in product development (I was a product design engineer) edge mounted micro switches designed for this use case were dirt cheep, rated to IP 6x (no dust ingress) and hundreds of thousands of presses.

There would still be side operations during machining of the case to make the raised profile (I assume there still will be one you can feel). And if anything that means more waste material. That or they still have an insert.

Maybe at Apple scale they can be similar in cost, but I don't believe there is a significant cost saving at all.

I fully agree with you for 100%. Personally, I don't mind the home gesture and although I sometimes get annoyed by weird gestures that I never knew I can deal with it.

But, seeing my parents get anxious with their new ipad because they cannot reliably go back to the home screen, their "safe" environment, it makes me sad.

A pro tip from your fellow young(er) person, enable AssistiveTouch [0] and at least give them an obvious button to press. My parents are very happy with it.

0: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202658

Assistive Touch is a bandaid I enabled, but it didn't give them the same piece of mind as a hardware button because it's "yet another thing on screen" they need to identify out of the clutter.

> I'm sure they'll do it since it saves money.

Probably it doesn't actually. I assume the reason is actually waterproofing and one less physical thing to wear out or break -- so it's for reliability. It probably actually costs more to do, but saves the user money in repairs/replacement.

I really like the way android did it. Retaining old touch screen buttons as a default and for those who want it, but also having the opiton of switching to a sleek new gesture-based way to navigate (taking less screen space), with both being supported.

But that's probably not an option for apple.

I don't have an iPad, but assistive touch might help your grandparents.

Have you tried the accessibility features? I see many people use soft home button that float on the screen because they find it convenient.

Wait... Exist a "home" gesture????

Checking...

Oh!!!!

---

I move to a iPhone 13 mini from iPhone SE 1st and the lack of a home button is the singles most stupid thing in the world....

How have you been using your phone without knowing the home gesture? It’s the only way to multitask or exit apps or unlock your phone

With the on-screen button.

But you said you moved to an iPhone 13. There’s no button on that one. Surely you didn’t just discover the gesture from this thread as your previous comment suggested?

It shows "Home" and "Select apps"???

I think they might mean AssistiveTouch.

It does save money, but it saves everyone money. Every part that moves is a part that has a fixed lifetime.

Replacing the home button was exceedingly common back when it was a button, and people had to either get a new phone or pay to have it fixed when it broke.

This was especially the case for the MacBook trackpad before it was made solid-state as well. That was not a cheap component to fix.

Iphone/ipad’s buttons have been static for a long time, they just vibrate imitating a physical touch.

Did you check the accessibility features?

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