Apple Expected To Remove 3D Touch From All 2019 iPhones in Favor of Haptic Touch (macrumors.com) 38
Four years after 3D Touch debuted on the iPhone 6s, the pressure-sensitive feature appears to be on the chopping block. From a report: Last week, in a research note shared with MacRumors, a team of Barclays analysts "confirmed" that 3D Touch "will be eliminated" in all 2019 iPhones, as they predicted back in August 2018. The analysts gathered this information from Apple suppliers following a trip to Asia earlier this month. This isn't the first time we've heard this rumor. The Wall Street Journal said the same thing back in January. Apple already replaced 3D Touch with Haptic Touch on the iPhone XR in order to achieve a nearly edge-to-edge LCD on the device, and it is likely the feature will be expanded to all 2019 iPhones. Haptic Touch is simply a marketing name for a long press combined with haptic feedback from the Taptic Engine. Apple commentator John Gruber adds: 3D Touch is a great idea but Apple never rolled it out well, and it was never discoverable. I wouldn't be surprised if most people with 3D Touch-enabled iPhones have no idea it exists. In and of itself, the lack of discoverability isn't necessarily a problem. That's how power user features often work. Right-clicking on the Mac, for example, is in the same boat. What 3D Touch never got right is that power-user shortcuts should be just thatâ-- shortcuts for tasks with more obvious ways to do them. Now imagine if right-clicking only worked on certain high-end Macs, but didn't work on others. That's what happened with 3D Touch.
I think it should have always been a shortcut for a long-press, pure and simple. Just a faster way to long-press. But because 3D Touch is not just a shortcut for a long-press, but is not available on any iPad nor many iPhones, developers could never count on it, so they never really did anything with it. It doesn't get used much because there's not much you can do with it.
I think it should have always been a shortcut for a long-press, pure and simple. Just a faster way to long-press. But because 3D Touch is not just a shortcut for a long-press, but is not available on any iPad nor many iPhones, developers could never count on it, so they never really did anything with it. It doesn't get used much because there's not much you can do with it.
Give it a chance! (Score:1)
I promise! I'll hold it right!
I'll get a more substantial offering of phones!
We haven't even opened the newest model!
Re: (Score:2)
LG's latest (G8) has all that except for the removable battery. LG dropped the removable battery from their product lines when they added wireless charging, so at least it's an overall improvement (no wearing out the USB-C port).
never a great idea (Score:5, Insightful)
Analog controls in a binary world are often a bit off- I mean, do you really want to jam your finger harder into a pane of glass? Between that and the idea that as a generally optional feature, it usually activated secondary / non-critical modes, you're left with the "press harder for a less important thing" - bad UX all around.
Re: never a great idea (Score:1)
It's a good idea as enhancement (Score:3)
Analog controls in a binary world are often a bit off
I agree with this, in how TouchID worked out - I think that a lot of people don't have the fine motor control to really make great use of something as subtle as TouchID.
I do agree with something John Gruber said about this story, which is that 3D Touch should only ever have been a quicker way to access features tied to a long-press gesture. If everything had worked generically that way, I think it would have been more helpful across the board, and also m
Re: (Score:2)
Even on the desktop, I really liked good old hierarchical menus with textual labels the best. So sensible. Hope they come back.
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah, gestures are so easy to trigger accidentally, it really can violate the dao of programming that a program should do that which startles the user the least :-D
I don't want Apple touching anything I own, thanks (Score:2)
Bad touch! Bad touch!
Yes, long presses have one major problem (Score:2)
They're necessarily slow. A good example is the long press on the space bar to get a freely movable text cursor: If a hard press would mean the same as a long press you could just press hard and immediately move the cursor (as you can indeed do on the whole keyboard with 3D Touch). But if all you have is a long press you always will have to hold and wait. This is infuriating and totally kills the editing flow.
My personal take why Apple never did anything worthwhile with that feature is that they wanted to i
Re: (Score:2)
For my usage, having to jam a finger hard slows me down just as much as the tap-and-hold... but with more "did it work? did it work?"
I don't think sensors for 3D touch (measuring how much the screen was flexing because of the finger jammed into it) would have much to do with reading a fingerprint anywhere on the screen.
Even Apple messed it up (Score:2)
All I wanted from 3D touch was the ability to open a link in a new background tab by force-touching it. Instead, that just pops up a strange floating preview that only lasts as long as you keep pressing, which is completely useless. Instead, to open a link in a new background tab I need to long-press and then select an option from a menu.
"3D Touch is a great idea" (Score:2)
[citation needed]
It works well on the Apple Watch (Score:3)
But the implementation on the iPhone always seemed counter intuitive even where it is used.
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Apple fans don't like anything until Apple implements it, and they start hating it once Apple abandons it.
Funny, Apple haters hate everything that Apple does first and swear they will never buy {{some_competitor}}'s product if they do the same thing, but then when {{some_competitor}} does the same thing some time later, the Apple haters applaud them for it and can't wait to buy it.
Good feature (Score:2)
I use it a lot. When I use my son's phone that does not have it I realize just how much I use it and how useful it is. Once you are used to it, it provides a nice mechanism to preview things quickly without having to open them. It's also much faster than a long-touch. A place it's extremely useful to me is in the control center (you know, the thing you swipe up from the bottom on older iPhones, and down from the top-right on the iPhone X). You can use a firm press on any widget in there to instantly br
Re: (Score:2)
I have no idea where the hate comes from. It revolutionized my use of the device once I discovered it.
Losing it will be a step back in my opinion.
Removal of a feature because some people are too fucking dim witted to utilize it does sound like a very Apple thing to do, though.
Disabled it early (Score:2)
Within weeks of getting my 6s, I had disabled 3D touch. Why? Because the phone had many "senior moments" when nothing happened when I tried to do keyboard entry, which got less frequent when 3DT was turned off.
Not all of the senior moments went away - Voice mail still fails to respond to commands more often than not, something Apple doesn't appear to consider a problem. But text entry started working as well as it had on my 3gs, which kept me from returning the 6s.