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My favorite iPhone feature was removed, long live its subpar replacement

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Re: My favorite iPhone feature was removed, long live its subpar replacement

#3

Was it earphones. I used to love my iPhone for music. I've a really nice set of noise cancelling headphones. Now I have a dongle (that always goes missing). I almost never listen to music with my iPhone anymore.

No but that's a good one as well! It was 3D Touch, where the screen actually had pressure sensitivity built into it.

Re: My favorite iPhone feature was removed, long live its subpar replacement

#6
Same.

I think myself as a power user for 3D Touch especially for using the keyboard to navigate within text. Not to mention previews (while I know most of these features still work to some extent by long press, it's more cumbersome).

I also get it that many "normal" users didn't even know about the feature and added complexity to hardware, so it was right for Apple to remove it, but I really miss it.

Re: My favorite iPhone feature was removed, long live its subpar replacement

#7
I agree with this entirely too much. I switched to Android via the iPhone 6S, which was the first one with 3D Touch. I thought it actually made the “hardware and software together” argument super strong too, because it truly only made sense when the OS supported it.

I know it was a power user feature, and I wish they kept it on the pro iPhones or reintroduced it there. One-handed text selection was an absolutely awesome feature, and it’s definitely not something everybody needs. But I too miss it dearly.

Re: My favorite iPhone feature was removed, long live its subpar replacement

#9
One of the issues with the 3D Touch replacement (“long press”) is that if I accidentally hold a finger on the screen for too long (e.g. I’m touching lightly to scroll, but pausing for a moment to finish reading), then I’m unintentionally long pressing something. This wouldn’t happen with 3D Touch.

Another one is that the illusion of pressing a tactile button is gone. 3D Touch would give tactile feedback only if the screen was pressed with force; this was realistic enough to simulate actual buttons on iphone7/8. The long press has no way of measuring force, so it accepts light touch too and still responds with haptic feedback; this doesn’t happen in the real world and the illusion is gone.

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