This may be shocking to hear from someone who would later edit a magazine called iPad and iPhone -UserBut I was the last of my friends who got a cell phone. In the end, I only agreed to buy one because I lost an effort.
In part, this can be explained by stubbornness, but another factor was that smartphones arrived a little too late for me. When they started in the UK, I was a premature middle-aged 20-something that already began to lose the fearlessness you see when children pick up touch screen units for the first time I had when 16-bit game consoles arrived a decade earlier. Children play with technique fortunately and careless, but I was worried that I would buy the wrong model, or use it wrong and break it. I was just a little scared to commit.
And I wasn’t alone. It happened early for me, but most of us start to find new technology scary at one point. We have all seen older relatives nervous on touch screens in anticipation of disaster, the bamboo of small keyboards or refusing to be lost outside the two or three drop-down menus they know is a safe way to access email or the internet on. Technology is not a fun experience when it makes you feel uncomfortable or insecure.
Apple’s great success was to understand this fear and find a way to reassure it. We are talking about the intuitive design of the iPhone and iPad that things do what you expect and the processes are simple and easy to understand. But these are inviting devices in ways that go far beyond the software interface. Apple’s engineers worked hard to make the first iPhones and iPad for something you would like to pick up, a reassuring object that invited interaction, not awe. And while the creed of minimalism would later risk becoming a mania, it was in the heart of having a small number of buttons so you could easily tell which one did what.
The most important element of everything was the home button, perfect size and shaped for the thumb and located at the bottom of the display. No matter where you were, no matter what you did, you only had to press the home button and you would be whipped back to security and confidentiality on the home screen. This was the press-in-case-of-emergency button for early iPhone and iPad owners, the seat belt, the parachute and get-out-of-jail-free cards. It was Don Draper’s carousel. It was Dorothy’s Ruby -Home Shoes, clicked together three times. There really was no place like home.
I do not think it is possible to exaggerate the importance of the home button in the early success of iPhone and iPad. Technical heads, early adoptors and the wealthy young people were always mature to be recruited when the smartphone revolution began, but the intuitive kindness of Apple’s devices enabled them to gain access and nervous users who would never have thought technology was For them. People, in other words like me.
It’s been 18 years since the first home button arrived with the first iPhone, but the time has come to say goodbye. Apple has been working on the transition for almost half of that time since 2017’s iPhone X admitted a future based on facial ID and full body screens, and it finally ended an era last week with the launch of iPhone 16E and Deposing Final iPhone SEE. There is now for the first time since 2007 zero products in the Apple Store with a home button. We will have to learn to live without it.
And I think it’s okay. The home button was important, but it brought its own problems. First, the precious space took on the front of your device; I would have trouble now swapping my iPhone 16 Plus to a screen the size of the SEs. And it used to go wrong one lot. When I started on Macworld, we had an article explaining what to do if your home button stopped working and it used regularly to get more traffic than anything else.
More important is that society is ready to move on. In these days, far fewer people, I suppose, I suppose, describe themselves as total beginners when it comes to technology. My parents’ generation has all smartphones, and most of them seem to own a tablet too; They are comfortable with the movements used to serve a touch screen. And a guy who used to be afraid of owning a cell phone now writes about them to live. We are ready to manage without a crutch on a home button, and much of the credit for it goes to Apple.
Foundry
Welcome to our weekly Apple Breakfast column, which includes all Apple News you missed last week in a practical Bite size Roundup. We call it Apple breakfast because we think it goes well with a Monday morning cup of coffee or tea, but it’s cool if you also want to give it a reading in lunch or dinner.
Trending: Top stories
iPhone 16e: ‘E’ means everything.
Or as a counterpoint: iPhone 16E is disappointing and it all is Apple Intelligence’s fault.
$ 699?! Why I can’t recommend the iPhone 15 to a single type of customer.
Apple Political reversal leading it down a outlined road.
Decides When to buy a mac is getting much easier.
Could Apple take on nvidia with a Standalone graphics card?
Someone hacked a Windows phone to ‘Run’ iOS.
The Podcast of the Week
There’s a new iPhone in town! Apple has released iPhone 16e And we have all the details of the latest episode of Macworld Podcast!
You can catch each episode of Macworld Podcast on Spotify, SoundCloud, Podcasts app or our own site.
Reviews Corner
Software updates, bugs and problems
Getting ready to be annoyed: Apple wants to put ads on cards.
No camera control? No problem, yours iPhone 15 Pro will soon get visual intelligence.
iOS 18.4 Set to ‘Beginning of April’ release after a long beta delay.
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