I don’t disagree with the overall premise, but I’d characterise Apple’s move to include more buttons in the iPhone as desperation - they’re increasingly running out of ‘innovations’ to justify each new generation of iPhones being worth an upgrade.

Touch screens have never really worked well for me. they show contacts around my fingers, no contacts at all; or spurious touches when im some distance away. If I ground myself they work better, but still not well. NFI what could do that.

My phone has a bottom panel... a left 'menu' touch screen area, a right 'back' area, and in the middle is a home button. Galaxy S6! Before that I used a droid and it had a nice optical joystick/center button.

I die inside a little when I have to use gestures to 'go back' whenever I must borrow an iphone.

I don't see the point in the entire front of a phone needing to be a screen also.

And audio jacks are just gone now from phones. Horrible designs and impractical decisions forced upon comsumers.

The fact that buttons reappearing on phones is now noteworthy is just hot garbage, it is all nonsense trends.

I wish Tesla (just the whole design department really) shared this sentiment.

Holy fn shite. WSJ usually has proper articles, but this one is just plain ridiculous bs.

The big question should be: how come the sober thinkers' voices were suppressed in this "debate" at a company the size of Apple (and Tesla). So in essence you know that jumping off a cliff would hurt, but nonetheless you do it, crawl back to the mountain and then explain your idiotic moves and the groundbreaking insight like it's some next big thing. No, you were stupid, now gtfo.

How come you cannot set what a fucking button should do on your OWN, overpriced phone? How come you cannot do proper text editing on that overpriced shit? How come every feature of an iphone, plain things like reordering shit on your main screen, is lauded?

gtfo, it's an oppressive device.

I've been dying to go back to a few buttons here on Android 14.

All there is on Pixel is Lock/Vol, and then rest is gestures.

There's at least one full screen app I use a lot, that makes task-switch really perilous. I swipe the bottom about 5 times before the handle appears, and the full screen app always receives breakthrough gestures that ruin its state.

"Back" is fine; I'm fine with that gesture and it works 99%. However, there are apps such as Maps that lead into a maddening labyrinth of "back, back, back" to where I am screaming for a Home button! There's no "Home" gesture. Let's have an easy reset to sanity.

Hard paywall: <https://archive.ph/lTXSR>

Alt accessible URL: <https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/touch-screens-are-...>

I miss resistive touch screens. Those things were neato. Nobody could keep track of a stylus though :(