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Comment by alephnerd | Hacker News Reader

That button is an increasingly expensive component at scale, as it's a separate component to manufacture and build a supply chain for, as well as an additional component to add which can potentially fail.

This is why most carmakers are moving towards touchscreens now as well.

If you want to keep prices roughly comparable to previous SKUs in the midst of trade and supply chain kerfuffles, there has to be cost cutting somewhere.

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if Apple of all companies -- after decades of moral high standing about polished user experience and charging a premium for their brand -- is shaving pennies off the cost by removing physical buttons ... that's a shame!

if 3nm chip manufacturing receives so much interest -- why not a fraction of that investment in engineering more durable, lasting, and cheap physical components too.

years later Apple might be the company doing "radical innovation", being "uncompromising when it comes to UX" and add a physical button and charge a premium for it

> is shaving pennies off the cost by removing physical buttons

These are not pennies at scale. These are 9-10 figure costs at scale.

Just using the iPhone 15 Max as an example [0], your BoM is around $550-650 (including labor), but sells for $1,200.

50% margins are not great, especially because the the BoM grew from $400-500 for the iPhone 14 Max (Edit: "The parts costs for the Max series ranged between $400 and $450 during the 2018 to 2021 period", not iPhone 14), which also sold for $1,200.

A 50% decrease in margins on the flagship phone is a massive decrease in margins, and it's most likely similar across all Apple SKUs.

Every single component if you're in the hardware space costs money and overhead to manage, and supply chain issues can push back releases.

This is why companies are moving towards digital displays. It's the same principle why EVs can be more reliable than ICE vehicles due to less parts

As an (I presume) Engineer drill the following mantra into your head: MARGINS, MARGINS, MARGINS.

This is what gives you your paycheck in the environment we are in today.

> if 3nm chip manufacturing receives so much interest -- why not a fraction of that investment in engineering more durable, lasting, and cheap physical components too.

3nm chip manufacturing is expensive and costs money. That money needs to come from somewhere. Turns out, a portion of that budget came from the budget for buttons.

[0] - https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Technology/iPhone-15-teardo...

> The 15 Pro Max's cost-to-price ratio, or the cost of the parts divided by the phone's price, came to 47%, a 1 percentage point increase from the 14 Pro Max

Your claim is contradicted by the article you linked.

From the article:

> The parts costs for the Max series ranged between $400 and $450 during the 2018 to 2021 period

> The estimated production cost of the model, calculated by adding up the cots of all parts used, stood at $558

Good catch though, I confused the iPhone 14 release date with 2021.

Editing.

I can tell you having been responsible for the aspects of a TINY scale in comparison button, about 30,000 units a year, that buttons are fucking hard man! It's so much harder to make a button than an entire PCB. You wouldn't think so, but you need to be GOOD at injection molding, stresses, DFM (design for manufacturing), cost analysis, generally know ALL the options to produce something, production tolerances and more just to talk to the actual experts in those fields.

Other poster is correct, it's a big deal, and it's why screens have replaced buttons in cars. It's so much cheaper to make a screen. Which is funny because as an EE, I judge a new vehicle first by how many buttons they still have.

As an electronics hobbyist who operates at an even smaller scale (where the cost of a pushbutton itself is trivial), I could not agree more strongly with this. Physical buttons are, counterintuitively, an absolutely massive pain in the butt from a design point of view. I tend to use touch sensitive pads instead. It makes the firmware more complex but the physical design so much simpler.

Last I heard, carmakers are moving away from touchscreens.

Because you can't use them without taking your eyes off the road.

> Last I heard, carmakers are moving away from touchscreens.

Depends on the country and margins.

For example, Chinese, Indian, and Vietnamese car manufacturers increasingly use touchscreens to minimize the amount of SKUs to manage and because touchscreen display manufacturing is commoditized in developing Asia.

The EU is pushing for regulation and limitations around touchscreen displays last month, but it was also around the same time the EU also announced anti-competitive action against Chinese automakers.

The US is a mixed bag around touchscreens. Some Chinese makes like a Volvo XC30 or a Polestar will be almost entirely touchscreen driven, and Tesla is also touchscreen driven for cost reasons, but other companies like your GMs or your Stellarises still have buttons, but are increasingly trying to move away.

> Volvo XC30 ... will be almost entirely touchscreen driven,

Pretty much blows away the "Volvo is safer" marketing message.

Carmakers are moving to touchscreens because they don't have to custom design hard keys for each model and can just reuse the same design in every one, just tweaking the software. It's pure cheapness, not an improvement in any way.

Apple has been building the same home button for a decade. It's a simple, familiar interface. iPads cost hundreds of dollars. Engineering the cost of a button out of it at this point is pure greed.