[ sourced from TechCrunch ]
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The ring/silent switch has been on the iPhone since the very first one was announced in 2007 by Steve Jobs, but now the writing is on the wall for the device’s last significant moving part.
With its replacement by a haptic “action button,” it’s just a matter of time before the rest of the lineup is as smooth as a pebble from the river.
At today’s iPhone event, the no doubt long-contemplated change was announced with little fanfare, selling the new button as a customizable shortcut to anything the user wants.
The ring/silent switch was not an innovation but a necessity: if you were going to use this thing as your main phone, you needed to be able to put it on silent or vibrate quickly and easily so you didn’t blow up a meeting or theater.
Over time that necessity has lessened as we gradually stopped paying attention to ringtones and distinct notification sounds because audio cues are superfluous if you’re looking at your phone’s lockscreen every 30 seconds anyway.
I want to be sad and mad about the loss of this, being as it is the last real moving part in the iPhone — the other buttons do technically depress but only trivially, and I suspect they won’t at all starting next year, once they work out the kinks in this test run.
The original article contains 705 words, the summary contains 225 words. Saved 68%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
huskypenguin@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
But I use that.
noride@lemm.ee 1 year ago
That’s not what Apple features are for, silly billy!