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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

#171

Post by cainxinth »

voqv wrote: post #122
avnigo wrote: post #36

I had a feeling this was gonna be about 3D Touch just from seeing the title. It was definitely one of my favorite features, and Force Touch isn't a drop-in replacement. With 3D Touch anywhere on the keyboard, you could apply pressure to start moving the caret (text cursor) around, but what was even more useful was being able to apply a little bit more pressure to start selecting text with incredible precision . With…

I will probably soon add an old 3D Touch iphone to my small Human Machine Interface hall of fame along with the old click wheel iPod Classic. They probably removed it because nobody was using it and they couldn't figure out how to teach people, while spending extra $ to add it into phones.

I read they removed it because it required space-consuming hardware to accomplish, and Haptic Touch approximates most of its features (most) with just software.

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

#172

Post by lancesells »

wodenokoto wrote: post #106
hericium wrote: post #76

I didn't even knew that my favorite iPhone feature was listening to the music I want until Apple introduced forced shuffling, playing titles alphabetically and started disturbing built-in music player UX in order to push their online offering. It's a typical Cook's Apple experience to listen to 10 tracks from different albums, all called "Outro", after album chosen by me finishes playing with a track called "Outro" a…

You can turn it off in settings somewhere. I really do enjoy albums ending, and think it is a poor UX choice to go to radio mode when an album is complete. However, for playlists, I think it is nifty, but afaik you can't have it both ways. It really should be a per playlist toggle at the bottom "continue on radio when all songs in this playlist have finished playing."

You can turn it off with the infinity symbol. As far as UX choice I find radio mode helpful as I'm a painter and my hands are occupied and I'm usually in a focused mode.

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

#173

Post by wyager »

frankfrankfrank wrote: post #110
PinguTS wrote: post #33

Yeah, missing this 3D Touch. The input experience (or AI supported typing) is getting worse and worse for me on the iPhone. Especially, if your are using different languages in parallel. For me it is my mother tongue German and my most second language English and sometimes using Spanish. In an (for me) unpredictable way, there are words replaced to "correct" typos. But, independent of the used keyboard language, whic…

Totally agree with the keyboard and predictive typing being a huge problem child that needs serious attention at this point. Some frustrations I have been dealing with: - The two word replacement pattern is immensely frustrating and leads to typos, e.g., where “AI” seems to think it knows better what I was trying to write and changes the previous correct word based on what it thinks I am trying to currently type/swip…

Another one - you can't use the swipe keyboard to type phrases apple thinks are "naughty", such as "white woman" or "kill myself". iOS will always change one of the two words, e.g. changing "white" to "while" or "kill" to "hill".

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

#174

Post by ericabiz »

Lio wrote: post #15

I actually used to turn 3D Touch off on my older iPhones. I just always use that long press on the space bar to move the cursor. 3D Touch is interesting from a technical point of view but it makes manufacture more complex and using the phone more complicated than it needs to be. I was always activating it by accident. When it was first announced I was excited that haptic feedback would allow us to feel the edges of t…

I co-own third party repair shops (we are not Apple certified since we do more complex repairs) and the screens for the 6S-XS have 3D Touch on them even if they’re not replaced by Apple.

I will say this, in 50,000+ 3D Touch iPhone screen repairs (conservative estimate) I don’t recall any complaints about non-working 3D Touch. I think probably 0.1% of iPhone users even knew it existed.

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

#175

Post by vladvasiliu »

4ggr0 wrote: post #166
vladvasiliu wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not at all my point. Whatever time it spends unplugged, is time spent draining the battery. Down to 90% or down to 0%, it's just a difference of amount. If you keep it plugged most of the time, and only drain it to, say, 90% (and this is an arbitrary number), you only used 10% of one cycle. If you let it unplugged until it's down to 0%, you use 100% of one cycle. If every day you let it go down to 0% and then…

I both agree and disagree with the first part of your comment, but you summarized my thoughts on your own with "it's a mobile phone, so one of the reasons for buying that is to use while out and about". > not everyone uses it that way, which can explain why some people see the battery health going down faster than others True, yes. However, and feel free to disagree, but from my experience the minority of people keep…

I understand your questioning, and I think it's fair to want to know that. But my whole point was that care should be taken when making comparisons, because the actual use of different people can have an effect on the metric of battery health.

I'd agree with your point that people keeping the phone plugged in all the time are a minority. But even so, I wonder if screen time is enough of a metric to gauge "similar use patterns".

For example, my phone absolutely drains the battery when using Google Maps, whereas browsing HN on a basic text-only app doesn't seem to make a dent.

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

#176

Post by jader201 »

whywhywhywhy wrote: post #127
mike_pol wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was sure it was going to be about it as well! 3D touch was a really cool feature. I also find now that it’s a lot easier to activate the flashlight or camera on the Lock Screen since they are not ‘buttons’ any more

Every time I unlock my phone I’m reminded that the stupid flashlight button can’t be turned off. The 3 times this year I’ve needed to use my flashlight are not worth the 20+ times it’s been accidentally running in my pocket because I held the wrong corner while pocketing my phone. Plus it’s in control centre anyway If you need it fast.

I think I’ve unintentionally trained myself to hold the phone on it’s sides when pocketing it, for this reason, now that you mention it.

I don’t think I’ve ever had the flashlight accidentally left on (not in a long time, anyway).

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

#177

Post by rez9x »

4ggr0 wrote: post #118
Reason077 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My daily phone is a beat-up iPhone X that I bought new on release, making it almost 5 years old. It has a cracked screen (dead OLED is slowly spreading out from the top-right corner), shattered back glass, battery at 81% health, and the earpiece speaker doesn’t work properly so to make a call I have to use a headset or speaker mode. But 3D Touch still works perfectly!

My iPhone 12 mini is a bit over 1.5yrs old and has a 86% battery health. I hope this trend does not continue as fast or I guess I'll have to replace it sooner than later.

I bought my 12 Mini at launch and it's at 84% capacity. If I'm remembering correctly, it was at around 86% at the start of this year.

There were some battery drain issues in different versions of iOS 14 and I believe there was some unnecessary wear in there, as well as a couple 'recalibrations' of battery health in iOS. Maybe the phone was falsely reporting 100% at release and was corrected to a lower percentage.

I'd be curious to see if anyone with a fall 2020 still has over 90% battery health.

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

#178

Post by everyone »

empyrrhicist wrote: post #156
voqv wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I will probably soon add an old 3D Touch iphone to my small Human Machine Interface hall of fame along with the old click wheel iPod Classic. They probably removed it because nobody was using it and they couldn't figure out how to teach people, while spending extra $ to add it into phones.

As if they put any effort whatsoever into teaching or UI discoverability these days. If there was a tutorial app I would have used it, but I have repeatedly had to use Google to find unrelated blog sites describing how to accomplish things in the iOS interface. Cynically, it feels like they think everyone should already "just know" how the various gestures work, which is obnoxious and user hostile.

As someone who only occasionally has to use macOS and iOS for work. The gestures and key combos required to do even the most basic things are insane.. and there is (almost) zero discoverability or affordances for them. On iOS gestures with multiple fingers, on macOS keyboard shortcuts with 3 or 4 keys.

I also dont often use Linux, but I could try some new distro with a completely different windows manager I have never seen before and I can figure it out and be happily computing in no time.

apple stuff always requiring searching on the internet to find out how how to do even most basic functions.

Also, not relevant, but I gotta mention as it grinds my gears so bad.. The only reason I have to use macOS is that it's required to build to iOS, which is just uniquely egregious. That sort of business should actually be illegal. Hopefully it will be in EU soon.

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

#179

Post by martijn_himself »

This is cool but I think technically minded people vastly overestimate how many people would use it even if they knew about it. It's just another thing to remember. I have an iPhone 8 and the 3D Touch version of it is clever but it doesn't seem to activate all the time (I'm not sure if that is a bug or not).

Apple probably collects usage statistics and knows no one (by approximation) uses it so they scrap it. That's sad, but understandable as well.

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

#180

Post by lttlrck »

chaosbolt wrote: post #69
avnigo wrote: post #36

I had a feeling this was gonna be about 3D Touch just from seeing the title. It was definitely one of my favorite features, and Force Touch isn't a drop-in replacement. With 3D Touch anywhere on the keyboard, you could apply pressure to start moving the caret (text cursor) around, but what was even more useful was being able to apply a little bit more pressure to start selecting text with incredible precision . With…

Force Touch would have been usable for me if I could just disable its vibration without having to disable it on the whole phone, I don't understand why they don't add special settings to do things like this. I hate that anytime I want to move the cursor and long press the space bar my phone has to vibrate.

I'm curious, how did the haptic feedback that indicates that you've enabled the feature make it unusable? FWIW its replacement is the same in that respect.
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