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iOS 18 Hints At A Buttonless Future For iPhone 16, Improved Battery On The Horizon (www.ibtimes.co.uk)

submitted 6 months ago by [email protected] to c/technology

47 comments fedilink hide all child comments

The latest iOS 18 update strongly hints that Apple's forthcoming iPhone 16 lineup might incorporate the highly anticipated solid-state buttons.

Unveiled at the recent WWDC, iOS 18 includes a much-discussed "hide and lock apps" feature that some worry could be misused for privacy concerns related to infidelity. Among its other noteworthy additions are many AI features and several notable improvements, including enhanced visual effects.

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[–] QuadratureSurfer 28 points 6 months ago (2 children)

My one concern is, what do I do if the phone freezes up?
With physical buttons there is a hardware bypass so I can force the phone to reset.
With a "trackpad" I'm not as confident it will register those touches correctly when the OS has seized up.
I'm assuming they'll have something figured out at the hardware level, but I'm curious what that will be.

[–] coolmojo 12 points 6 months ago

Just take out the battery, oh wait.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 6 months ago (1 children)

I assume it wouldn't be too different from how it works now. On phones without a home button, you press volume up, volume down and then hold down the side button. This forces a reset even if iOS completely froze/crashed. Now this same low-level interrupt (or whatever is actually happening, I'm not sure) works with solid state buttons instead. I don't see the problem. It's not like the current side button physically cuts the power if you hold it down for 5 seconds, there is some low-level firmware running that listens for that key combo and then resets the SoC.

Come on, I know many people in the Fediverse dislike Apple, but do you actually think they'd not think about that..? This would blow in the press up a few weeks after launch and Apple surely wouldn't want that.

I feel like this might be one of those things where people are like "oh this is bad" but then >99.9% of the people actually using it are completely fine with it and all the issues people talked about beforehand like resetting when the OS froze will be non-issues because it'll work just like it did before.

[–] QuadratureSurfer 4 points 6 months ago

I think I was thrown off by the "trackpad" example that was given above. That would have been a bit more complex than just a simple button press (which is still doable in low level firmware) but I was curious how they would pull it off.

I looked up what "solid state buttons" are and it makes a lot more sense now. This isn't like some trackpad you can swipe along the endge, they're still buttons in separate locations, just not in the mechanical clicking sense that we're used to.