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.
The replacement for 3D Touch:
“If you long press (aka hold down) on the spacebar of your touch screen keyboard (which works on iPad too) you can get into trackpad mode.”
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.
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.
Kinda unfortunate that phones have made basic workflow gestures like this so obscure. Let's not even get into how "undo" is accessed by shaking the whole device
Although there are now[1] three non-shaking ways to access undo[2] - 1) the three-finger tap which brings up the copy and paste icon bar also contains undo and redo, 2) three-finger swipe left, 3) three-finger double tap (which isn't 100% reliable for me in things like Safari since it tends to trigger "show me the tabs").
Yeah, they could really do with a "I see you're shaking the phone to undo, what about trying one of these new ways?" kind of popup / tutorial for things like this. They're great at introducing new features but useless at surfacing them to users.
Yeah on Android interfaces there is a common concept of a 'hamburger icon' on screens. It may not be the best UX but at least if a dev doesn't know how to expose a certain feature in the UI they can put it in the menu that expands from the three dots icon
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.
> I’m touching lightly to scroll, but pausing for a moment to finish reading
Just checked on my own behavior in this regard, and I seem to have grown a habit of just scrolling slightly enough to not make it appear to be a long press before actually resting my finger on the screen.
This might be a more common habit and would explain the consensus of long presses not being seen as too problematic.
Every family member whose midrange phone I have to update due to EOL software or additional carrier bands somehow loses every feature they actually value and they rightfully complain it's a downgrade.
I feel like this even without replacing my hardware, the software alone updates itself and changes all the time. I feel like whenever I open the youtube app it looks slightly different. See that button? Now it's gone! A week later, it's there again! Few days later, it's gone again, turns out the previous week was just A/B testing.
I wanted to play music that was stored locally on my phone. But Play Music has been deprecated for YouTube Music, and so it only redirects to a download page. Which would mean figuring out new permissions for a new application, whether it can read local files at all, whether it can read local files that may be marked as accessible only by a different application, whether the new app will give notifications that need to be disabled, and so on.
Why is it being replaced? Because there's a new branding. Why is the old application being disabled? Because it would be insecure to keep it without security updates. Why does it need security updates? Because it accesses the internet. Why does a local music player need to access the internet? Because they merged the local music player and streaming music player.
So there's a ridiculous user experience and unnecessary deprecation, all because local functionality interacts with nonlocal functionality.
I know everyone’s sick of hearing about it, but they’ve permanently lost my interest in upgrading thanks to the aux jack removal. Some features are so important that across the board improvements elsewhere still don’t justify the loss.
I definitely don't miss it. Sure, it was great pressing into the keyboard to move your text cursor position, but it was a feature that most users didn't know about (and would never find about since there was usually no visual affordance).
Why would Apple keep hardware that most people didn't know about and didn't use?
I do miss the headphone jack, but clearly Apple is not bringing that back.
3d touch was incredibly frustrating because there was both long touch and hard touch and they both feel like similar actions but did different things. I think the world is better off without it adding on yet another way to hide potential user actions behind impossible to guess and subtle gestures.
What's that? I'm another iPhone user who likes 3D touch, and I've seen a few Androids, but I've never heard of a squeeze function. Do you trigger some function by squeezing the sides?
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 the virtual keyboard keys and improve typing accuracy. That's not what we got and I've found very little utility in the current implementation sadly.
It also makes it harder to get the screen replaced. Since I don't live near an Apple Store that's important to me. I want to be able to pop into a local locksmith and get them to change a broken screen while I wait. The alternative is either a long drive or sending the phone away for days on end.
If Apple really wanted to impress me they would replace the dictation key on the keyboard which I regularly trigger by accident with something useful like an Undo button. I have never used dictation so this is just a daily irritation to me.
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.
Kinda like lack of a real Delete key on Apple laptops. Point that out, and iPologist dweebs always jump in with "Nyeahh, Command-delete!"
NO. Not only is this ridiculously cumbersome, but it's not marked on the keyboard. So 99+ % of Apple users undertake DOUBLE the keystrokes to arrow the cursor past the letters they want to delete and then use Apple's mislabeled Backspace key to get rid of them. I've been in the Apple store and heard a customer come in and ask if there's some way to configure the keyboard to have a legitimate Delete key.
Meanwhile everyone else manages to provide a real Delete key, even on SMALL laptops.
Lol, I am that guy (the one that buys the products that die in the market). I like 3d touch. It was so seamless you don't realize it is an additional feature.
I wonder if reliability was a factor in ending this feature.
3D touch malfunctions badly with a slightly swelling battery pressing against the lcd backplate inside the phone. Or a bend in the phone chassis. The 6s case was bent for every person who carried it in their back pocket. I saw malfunctioning 3d touch several times every week back when I was in phone repair. Especially with carrier insurance refurbs, where the replacement parts were of especially poor quality. Carrier refurbs often had the cheapest batteries, screen assemblies and sometimes non original chassis.
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.
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.
What's usually missing from these comparisons is how long people are actually using the phone and how they handle the battery.
Mine is an iPhone 7 I bought refurbished back in February 2017. This phone is likely to have seen less use than a friend of mine's phone bought at the end of 2021. It spends 95% of its life connected to a power source (even when I actively use it), so I expect the battery to last quite some time.
> What's usually missing from these comparisons is how long people are actually using the phone and how they handle the battery
According to my phone, over the last 10 days I had an average screen time of 3h34m per day. I use it to communicate and to consume media while commuting. I charge it whenever it needs some juice, it does get to down to 10%-20% sometimes.
But honestly I don't see how my usage can hurt it so much. And if my usage is indeed what damages the battery so much, then that seems to be Apples issue, considering how I'm really not a poweruser or whatever.
What battery health does your phone have? I can't imagine that having a phone connected to a power source 95% of its lifetime can be especially good for the battery.
Letting it go down to 20% before charging it back up means the battery has to cycle, and as I understand, that's what "ages" it. And managing that is on you, it's not Apple's fault that you won't (or can't) plug it in.
What can be Apple's fault is the battery going to 10% after using it for 3h, but I don't think that's the point here.
I'm sorry, but how can it be my fault for using a device until it's battery is low-ish?
> Letting it go down to 20% before charging it back up means the battery has to cycle
Apple actually says themselves, that "You complete one charge cycle when you’ve used (discharged) an amount that equals 100% of your battery’s capacity — but not necessarily all from one charge." [1]
The iPhone 12 mini has a 2,227mAh battery. Its battery health is at 86%, so effectively I have 1915mAh. But now you're also telling me that I can't use it past 20%, which leaves me with 1530mAh, or 68% of the original capacity.
I can totally agree that with long-term usage it's up to the user to optimize their battery usage for health. But my device was at 92% battery health after not even a full year and I simply won't accept that this is on me. Especially if we consider how expensive and complicated Apple makes it to replace a battery. Apple also tells me that I can charge my battery whenever I want.
To give more insight, GPS is fully disabled 99% of the time, it runs in dark mode, auto-brightness is disabled and I usually set it to a pretty low brightness, 5G is disabled and generally I remember disabling lots of things like "double tap to wake screen", "lift phone to wake screen" etc.
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 charge it back up, in 10 days you've used 10 cycles.
If every day it only loses 10% (total) and charge it back up, in 10 days, you've used 1 cycle.
I'm not saying "it's your fault" or that "you shouldn't do it", I'm talking about objective use of the battery.
Yeah, I know it's a mobile phone, so one of the reasons for buying that is to use while out and about.
But the point is that not everyone uses it that way, which can explain why some people see the battery health going down faster than others, on the same device.
And that's not Apple's fault. Sure, you could argue that the battery life is ridiculously short, that the battery's health shouldn't degrade as fast, and so on. And I'd agree with that. But still, it's a different issue.
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 their phones plugged in as much as they can, at least in my social circle and work environment.
I knew that I would have to live with shorter battery life when buying a small phone with a small battery and I also know that batteries just loose health and that this is normal. The drop on my device just makes me think that maybe my device has some kind of issue, or received a battery which would be placed on the left side of a bell curve.
Wanted to check the exact stats - So, I bought it in the end of April 2021. That's 16 months ago. If a 14% loss of battery health during that time is normal, then maybe I had wrong expectations. It just seems excessive when comparing with other people/devices.
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.
Being constantly charging is actually bad for the battery life. Being around 100% stresses it… so that’s why some Apple devices now try to determine how much charge is needed and keep it at 80% if possible
It does. But does it stress it more than charging to 100% then draining it to, say, 10%, then charging it again? Hence, racking up cycles at a faster rate?
I know it's anecdotal, but I mostly keep my battery-powered electronics plugged-in when possible, and their batteries tend to degrade much less over the years compared to a friend's, who tends to unplug them and charge them when needed. And the electronics in question are fairly similar: iPhones and same-gen Macbooks.
Same for my work laptop (hp) which, after 4 years, still has around 80% of its original battery life, when my colleagues', who use them much more often on battery, only last around 50% of their new condition, if they weren't changed because of swelling.
The one kind of battery among mine that seem to have shorter lives are camera batteries. Which, of course, tend to get drained more since I don't have an outlet handy when out in the woods.
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.
I wonder if reliability was a factor in ending this feature.
I think the issue is more that it was not very discoverable. A bet the vast majority of non-tech users didn't even know it existed and perhaps accidentally activated 3D touch much to their confusion.
Removing it simplifies the hardware, avoids accidental activations and is less maintenance work.
I still miss 3D Touch :(. I am happy that Macs still have Force Touch, even though Force Touch and haptic feedback are criminally underused. There are so many useful applications, e.g. OmniGraffle gives subtle haptic feedback when dragging an object and it aligns with another object. It's such a nice feature that other apps could learn from.
You're probably thinking of the bend gate controversy, where the bend in the case in the plus model was severe enough to damage the logic board. That, also, was not rare. We saw it constantly in the shop. Nearly every iphone 6, 6s or 6p that entered the shop had a bent case to some degree.
Same here. I wanted to upgrade from Xs to the 13 mini while mini is in the lineup, but found myself missing 3D Touch too much. Probably gonna hold on to the Xs until its EOL unless something really compelling gets added before then.
3D Touch was a big UX problem, there was never a way to show the user that you could do it and where you could.
Apple has a problem with discoverability in quite a lot of features. There's many small little things in iOS that users don't know about and likely will never find out about, perhaps because they want to keep the UI clean.
Tips is actually a great example of how Apple fails at this/discoverability. The tips in there are novice and below level at best. With none of the advanced features even discussed, let alone more obscure or hidden ones.
See, I didn't know that, and I've had iPhones since the 4 (a grand total of four devices), and am the sort of person who reads the manual in general, and likes to know all the features of a device I spend time with.
On the one hand, thanks for the tip! On the other hand, Apple has an enormous discoverability problem, it's getting worse, and they're responding by making the UX dumber instead of addressing it head on.
I'm glad you understood how to activate 3d touch as opposed to normal touch and long touch. I've had this iphone XS since it was a new model and I still haven't figured it out.
This trackpad mode sounds interesting though, I'll try it :)
I think the feature got more confusing as Apple started to phase it out. They dropped the feature where you could force-touch to select text (on e.g. a web page rather than typing) and press harder again to select eg sentences/paragraphs. They also made force touch and long press do the same thing in many cases. I think about the only place it works well is in the keyboard but sadly there are now a bunch of bugs there with replacements/corrections not interacting with the text suggestions properly (and they deleted the feature where pressing shift while replacing will capitalise/uppercase the suggested replacement)
The one thing I remember was buying the phone when the model was like 6 months since launch, pressing on an app icon on the desktop and randomly getting either the 'move the apps' state or the context menu with apparently no logic to it.
And nothing's changed since then. Sorry. It's too confusing.
> But the ease of use and selection capability has been greatly reduced. You can still select text but it takes two hands (or fingers?) and I can’t seem to figure out how it delineates its boundaries so I end up never using it.
Only now thanks to the OP I understand how to achieve this without 3D touch. Poor discoverability on this feature never ends.
Same! I only just upgraded phones a couple weeks ago and the lack of 3D Touch was confounding when I made text errors! I didn’t know I could activate it with the spacebar but that works pretty well!
It took me forever to learn how to select text again. I feel like Apple really kind of damaged itself by hiding things, not telling anyone properly, and then removing things because no one was using it because they had no idea it was there. It’s such a typical asinine corporate/communist/top down/command structure problem. problem
Could you explain further how to do it? I still don't get it :( I always just double-tap a word to select it and then drag the selection tabs to expand to what I want. If there's another way I'm interested to hear it.
Hold spacebar to start the cursor. Use 2nd finger tap on the keyboard, the selection markers will show up. Now use the first finger again to move left/right to select stuff.
First time trying it for me but it seems.. odd, maybe need to get used to it.
Ahh, thanks. Selecting that way is so janky for me that I wonder if it's not actually a bug. I tried a number of times and it behaves really weirdly / unpredictably.
When you have activated the cursor move function by long-pressing the space bar, while still pressing the screen, tap another finger on the screen to move into selection mode.
The prior mention of defining the start and end points of the selection is a bit more tricky and may not even be an actual feature, which involves moving the cursor around in a kind of handoff between start and stop point. That’s trickier to describe because it fellas like it may just be a quirky behavior that can be manipulated.
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, which is completely ignored for this auto-correct, it replaces it with German word, when I write English and sometimes with English words when I type German. Then this forced touch was helpful to select the letters/word to re-write it correctly to make the sentence meaningful. But now, this whole selection process is completely broken (for me). Since the removal of force touch, when I try to go to a specific spot, it selects parts of the sentence in a completely (for me) unpredictable way. Then I have no chance to un-select anymore, so I have to replace the whole. The experience is getting worse and worse.
I’ve been experiencing something similar recently, and for a while even thought it was just me getting worse at typing on such a small keyboard.
However, the points you make are absolutely right, and in addition it has recently developed the annoying trait of sometimes choosing to replace previous words that I have specifically typed and selected.
But I think it's great that the keyboard language does not define the autocorrect language.
The German keyboard has smaller-sized keys and it would drive me insane I think if I had to switch to the German keyboard in order to type German text.
I disagree. In my experience you just develop different muscle memories for different languages after enough time. The Zhuyin keyboard for Chinese has four rows and even smaller keys but basically works fine once you have some practice with it.
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/swipe. A good example just happened below; I tried typing “mid word” below, once I started swipe typing “word” iOS thought it would be a great idea to change “mid” to make it “miss words”. Thanks for the unhelp Apple.
- The random capitalizations for no apparent reason, sometimes even mid word, and no, not from accidentally hitting shift, even during swipe typing.
- The infuriating overbearing and downright evil efforts at speech and thought control. For example you can’t swipe type certain things Apple has clearly designated as wrongthink; assuming of course that the only possible reason someone would want to use the sequence of words Apple has designated as wrongthink is for purposes that violate their perspective of narrow utopian authoritarian society.
- That for some reason sooner rather specific acronyms seem to be prioritized over the most common words in the English language through inaccuracy. One example; try swipe typing “is” with some inaccuracy and you get “OSS” instead, ab rather obscure acronym to replace “is”, or OSS it?
- The concatenation of “a” (I think there are others I can’t recall) rather than automatically adding a space when there is a hyper (I think that’s what it’s going on), so e.g., “it’s a” turns into “it’sa” … “he’s a” “what’sa”
- I too have gotten the sense some of it may even have to do with or is exacerbated by using multiple keyboard languages. I love when the autocorrect “AI” substitutes words from a different language altogether, that’sa (that was organic, but left for sarcastic effect) really great feature! (Yes, that’s more sarcasm)
> The random capitalizations for no apparent reason, sometimes even mid word, and no, not from accidentally hitting shift, even during swipe typing.
I've never had capitalization for no apparent reason (maybe I didn't pay enough attention), but I have a similar pet peeve, where the AI learns "a bit too much".
I write a lot of French, and a fairly common phrase I type is "c'est chiant" (that sucks). At first, it would try to autocorrect this to something else, probably because it's "not nice" to write that.
But after insisting on writing that for a while, it must have figured "ok, let him write that". Except that it learned the whole phrase, capitalized, because it's usually the first thing I type, so it automatically capitalizes the first letter (I always rely on automatic capitalization when writing informally).
But now when I want to write that in the middle of a sentence, it will auto-capitalize the C.
As I recall, there's a workaround somewhere for that. I too find it irritating that my phone manufacturer would decide they need to censor my language. If I want to use the F word, that's my business. Autocorrect used to just be mildly annoying and humorous. In the last few years it has evolved to infuriating. And it can be so persistent, too. Used to be just back up and retype and it would leave you alone, but much of the time now it just keeps on trying to 'correct' what I'm typing.
Is there a way to change it so autocorrections are shown as suggestions rather than done automatically? I haven't used iOS in a few years, but I recall being frustrated with the default autocorrect implementation.
On other devices/keyboards (SwiftKey for example) I type a word and if it thinks I might mean something else, it shows up in a row of 3 suggestions above the keyboard. If it's correct, I tap the suggestion and it replaces whatever I'd actually typed.
Makes for easy fixes and only adds an extra "tap" if I see a mistake that needs to be corrected. Either way, beats backing up and retyping or jumping through hoops to remove "ducking" from the dictionary.
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".
It's really fascinating -- on my phone (iOS 15.5), "white people" was correct to "white purple," "black people" was corrected to "blank people" (wtf Apple???), but "Asian people" went through just fine. I wonder if it has to do with something like specific ethnicity vs. broad categorisations used for bigotry. Dunno.
> 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/swipe. A good example just happened below; I tried typing “mid word” below, once I started swipe typing “word” iOS thought it would be a great idea to change “mid” to make it “miss words”. Thanks for the unhelp Apple.
SwiftKey on Android (Microsoft) does the same thing to me on occasion. It is indeed very annoying.
For your autocorrect issue with other languages: in addition to having the keyboards activated, do you also have the languages activated in Settings / General / Language & Region? I had to have both the keyboard enabled and the language in here to stop the default-language only autocorrects.
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, you can long press on the space bar till you get haptic feedback, then you can move the caret around freely. However, if you want to select text, you need to use a second finger on the keyboard after you start moving the caret around, but honestly it's an absolute mess to use; try it out, I can guarantee you won't be able to select what you were planning on.
However, as much as I miss it every time I fail to accurately select text on iOS, I don't mourn its loss. Force Touch is adequate. It's just not a replacement, and seems a shame it was probably removed to reduce costs and hardware complexity, all at the cost of regression.
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.
Interesting, so there was a patent claim settled at the start of 2018 over this, and the iPhones released at the end of 2018 had the feature removed. I wonder how much of an impact that had, versus usability / weight / cost considerations.
Force Touch is something supported by 2015+ MacBook trackpads (you can push harder to effectively middle-click something) and 3D Touch was the iPhone screen tech that did the same thing, which has been replaced with Haptic Touch (equivalent to Android's "long press").
It seems the selection can only grow and on both sides, which is the main problem.
If they showed the cursor with a different color than the selected text, and if they shrink and grow the selection as you move, I think it could be pretty nice: select the starting point of the selection, and select only what’s in between the original cursor and the moving one.
Alas it’s more like painting a selection at the moment, with an invisible brush.
The problem here is that the “move left to expand left” and “move right to expand right” doesn’t map mentally to the way a cursor works.
With a traditional cursor, it places an anchor wherever you’ve moused down and then drags the selection around that anchor.
Whereas with Haptic Touch selection, there’s no anchor, so you find yourself selecting text you didn’t mean to. I’m sure that once you’ve gotten used to it, it’s a nice feature; but it’s not intuitive if you’re not accustomed to it (which seems to be the majority of folks).
I enabled arrows keys on every single keyboard on the Android devices I owned. I use them to move the cursor and fix mistakes, usually by tapping and adjusting with the arrows. Faster than attempting to tap at the right spot. Are there no arrows on iOS keyboards?
When I worked at Apple training people about the first iPhone generations they always said stuff like "it SHOULD be intuitive, we dont WANT a tutorial" I chuckled then, but add 15 years of changes on something and I don't know how that was ever going to be possible.
Tips is underrated. I think back then people just didn’t want a thick manual (also available in the Apple Books store) just to get value out of their phones, but Tips fills the need of providing some guidance as changes occur.
It is an App installed on current iPhones, iPads, and Apple Watches. It just outlines features in the products, e.g. new iOS 15 features, “Essentials”, What’s new in watchOS 8, “Health”, “Beyond Basics”, “AirPods Max”, “AirPods”. I think various sections show up depending on what you buy or add to your Apple ID, and usually I’m able to learn a few things a year from it that I missed in the announcements or didn’t see covered elsewhere.
I hear this complaint a lot, but what is the solution exactly? Cramming labeled buttons for every possible action onto every screen? There's not a lot of space to work with, and even less when the touch targets have to be large enough for a big fat thumb to press accurately/reliably.
You can do most of the things that most users need to do just knowing how to tap icons and swipe up to go home. I don't think it's such a big issue that there are some power user features that you either discover by messing around or word of mouth.
Unobtrusive GUI indicators - small tabs that suggest pulling, textures to suggest numbers of fingers or tapping actions etc. Add a menu item to turn visual hints off if desired, but have the UI be discoverable by default.
> It seems the selection can only grow and on both sides, which is the main problem.
I could have sworn it used to work like how you'd expect, where it's anchored from the place you started highlighting. I got my first iPhone, the 12 mini, when it came out. So end of 2020, and I thought that was how text selection worked when I first got it, then it seemed at some point, perhaps after an update it started working where it would only grow the selection and you couldn't unselect if you accidentally went too far. I thought they introduced a bug but it hasn't changed since then. I have no source for this, only my own memory, but maybe someone else can tell me I'm correct/incorrect about that?
The current implementation is way too hard to use. Especially if, for example, you're selecting something starting on the far right side of a line to the far left side of the same line. You have to thread the needle of the above and below lines like a game of Operation, because if you go too high or too low, you'll accidentally end up selecting that entire line.
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.
I hate notifications and talking on the phone, and after years I developed a pavlov reaction to it whenever my phone vibrates or makes a sound so I keep that at a minimum for important notifications, I used to love the samsung notification led but the iphone doesn't have that, so having a haptic feedback whenever I want to move the cursor (which is lots of times) makes me cringe.
> However, as much as I miss it every time I fail to accurately select text on iOS, I don't mourn its loss
Yes, it's slightly worse now but for a greater cause and the greater cause, IMHO, is the unified interaction model on mobile devices. If not all devices and apps are using it there's no reason to having it.
In the Android world there are tons of exotic stuff, novel ideas and even "standards" that go nowhere unless Apple implements it.
There is a magic in general availability. I think, if all Apple devices had it, it could have been possible to rely on its existence and build the UI with that assumption in mind. With just some devices having it, you need to have few versions of the UI to handle each case.
> I too enjoy the removal of innovation and excellence in the quest for equality comrade
I think you misunderstood. This is not an argument for equality at all, the problem with patchy support is that few bother to implement features against because it costs time and money and as a result fades into usbcuirity.
Having uniform platform is a very effective for innovations success. It makes sense for Apple and the developers to have the hardware based 3D touch with a software based alternative so that it can work on all devices the same way.
> There is a magic in general availability. I think, if all Apple devices had it, it could have been possible to rely on its existence and build the UI with that assumption in mind. With just some devices having it, you need to have few versions of the UI to handle each case.
The way you get there is by putting it into everything for several years.
Cutting it after three is the opposite of working for that greater cause.
For some reason, no iPad had it. Maybe it becomes problematic on large screens, maybe the user experience degrades on large screens because of simple physics i.e the the strength needed for applying pressure becomes uncomfortable since it will act as a lever in the hands of the user?
Maybe the force the user can apply when iPad is on a table(no lever effect) and when is handheld(strong lever effect, user needs counterforce on the other end of the screen to achieve firm press) is far too different to reliably activate the gesture?
I’ve been so sad since upgrading my 6s about the loss of 3D Touch. I didn’t know that you can hold on the space bar now!!! Thank you for making me love my 13 mini even more now :):)
It isn't the same though, since trying to move the cursor down moves your finger off the touch screen. You can only move it down one line at most, and not reliable.
Yeah—I'm a reasonably dextrous person, but had to disable 3d touch on iOS and whatever the fancy pressure thing is on recent macbook touchpads, to make them usable. Constant mistakes with either turned on.
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.
The shortcuts associated with menu items are shown in the menu item. I realize that there other discovery problems with keyboard shortcuts (on all platforms) but there is non-zero discoverability for "the most basic things" on Mac OS.
Gesture discoverability is much closer to zero, IMHO.
what you mean most people don't go explore every single page of the System Preferences when they get a new computer and look at all the helpful animations in the Gestures pane, I'm shocked
(yeah this is the computing equivalent of a locked file cabinet in a disused toilet stall in a dark basement with a sign on the door that says "Beware The Leopard")
> yeah this is the computing equivalent of a locked file cabinet in a disused toilet stall in a dark basement with a sign on the door that says "Beware The Leopard"
OTOH it makes complete sense to have a look at the Trackpad pane to see how it works. It’s not like it’s hidden behind a defaults command line, and it even has movies. It’s much worse on phones.
macOS help menus are incredibly useful, system preferences is helpful, and support.apple.com actually has some useful guides. Apple also provides free training sessions at Apple Stores, and free remote support 24/7 AFAIK through AppleCare.
What do you expect? Unskippable videos when you first set up a mac followed by a mandatory test that you have to pass before you can use the computer?
Mac OS Help menu search is spectacular for discoverability. Start typing what you want and it pops up the menu with an arrow and it shows you the shortcut.
Everyone else does it worse, except maybe the VSCode command palette.
You read the man page/documentation for the software you installed that they're for, or else you defined them yourself and don't need to discover them.
Sure, but the complaint was discoverability, my point is that on Linux you start with something you don't need to discover: you either defined the shortcut yourself, or you installed something that defines it by default. There are no 'system shortcuts'.
Absolutely not. Machines and software that interrupt users are Kafkaesque torture devices. Hell is full of Clippies and microwaves that repeatedly beep for eternity.
The thing some email clients do where they say “did you mean to attach something” is the one I love.
I’d like a Mark II version which also says “there is no such thing as Sunday 8th of August this year” so that I can fix my errors before they cause problems.
It's just fundamentally a bad idea. Software should never, ever bother the user during use about how it's being used. That's what tutorials and documentation are for.
No matter how clever and subtle you think you're being, you're still just redirecting the user's attention from the task at hand toward the UI itself. No matter how ignorable, dismissable, or optional it is, it's an abysmal UI failure and it shouldn't even happen once. Make the feature right in the first place and you won't have to resort to nagging.
>if there was a tutorial app I would have used it..
Isn't that the Tips App? I'm pretty sure it gets recommended every time you set up a new phone. Mine has a tip on using Haptic Touch with the keyboard to move the insertion point.
I just looked at that for the first time, there's some neat stuff. Didn't know you can define actions for tapping on the back of the phone, even works with my case.
Not only is there a tutorial app ("Tips") but you receive a notification pointing you towards it shortly after setting up a new iOS device. Also after major iOS updates. So... Yeah I suppose you're making their point for them, to an extent.
Does this apply to iPads? I had mine set up by my employer and don't think I've seen a prompt. I also don't recall seeing this on an iPhone SE I had, so maybe discover ability would be better than popups for a tips app.
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.
That game really does build up mouse skills. I remember playing it when I was 5 and having no idea what the rules were - I just liked to click all the fun little boxes with the cool numbers and bombs.
Way back in the day, Apple shipped several different "Mouse Practice" tutorials on their computers to teach new users how to use the mouse. Here's videos of two of them:
That's a great idea. Steam deck comes with a short game - Aperture desk job - that tests all of the controls. I didn't know it had a gyro until I played that game.
I believe it was removed in big part due to being a relatively big energy drain. With that in mind, I don’t believe it was a bad decision, even though I liked the feature as well. (Though probably with additional R&D on the topic, it could have been improved)
And, IIRC, 3D Touch was also technologically infeasible to implement on iPad. That sharply limited what they could do with it, since it would never be available on all iOS devices.
I didn't even realize this is why the feature didn't work anymore. I thought I was doing something wrong. It's terrible. I find text selection and cursor placement on the iPhone to be infuriatingly difficult. The trackpad feature made it sooo easy. It was world class. Now it is just... gone? With no alternative?
As long as you want to select entire words, just double tap and drag -- same as desktop to do word-based selection. And even if you don't want to do word-based selection, double tap is a good way to start selection and have the selection carets close to where you want them that you can easily manually adjust.
You could probably run something over the output summary to make it sound like commentary. A filter to make the comment seem "unsure" about the conclusions of the article, or one to make it express gratitude that the article was written.
Force Touch was the same tech as 3D Touch, first introduced on the watch. It was rebranded for the iPhone when the pressure sensitivity stuff was added.
"Both 3D Touch and Haptic Touch fall under the umbrella of Force Touch functionality. This is Apple's general name for its technology that lets input devices distinguish between different levels of pressure when you touch them."
Neat, knew about the 3d caret placement for years but not the selection part. It doesn't seem to be incredible precision however, on mine you can only add one word at a time to the end of the selection.
Better than I knew before, but not incredible. Would at least require letter by letter precision for that.
> you can long press on the space bar till you get haptic feedback, then you can move the caret around freely. However, if you want to select text, you need to use a second finger on the keyboard after you start moving the caret around
Now how as a "user of apple products for 8 years" was I supposed to guess this ? Thank you ! You made my day !
I always used the cursor function, but did not know about the press again selection mode. I still have a iPhone 10, so i can still enjoy while it lasts.
3D Touch was a lovely feature but to be honest I’ve adapted to its replacements to the point where I hadn’t thought about it for months until reading this. I imagine the amount of engineering complexity on the hardware side for such a relatively niche feature just didn’t make sense, also the fact that it seemingly couldn’t scale to iPad sized screens. A shame, but probably a sensible move.
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[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 290 ms ] threadI did not know that. Thank you!
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.
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.
[1] Since iOS 13, 2019 [2] https://www.macworld.com/article/233056/ios-13-and-ipados-13...
And for real, I'm suspecting Android is better at this than iPhone
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.
Just checked on my own behavior in this regard, and I seem to have grown a habit of just scrolling slightly enough to not make it appear to be a long press before actually resting my finger on the screen.
This might be a more common habit and would explain the consensus of long presses not being seen as too problematic.
Anecdotical, I remember not having to do this initial micro scroll as a more comfortable scrolling experience.
Why is it being replaced? Because there's a new branding. Why is the old application being disabled? Because it would be insecure to keep it without security updates. Why does it need security updates? Because it accesses the internet. Why does a local music player need to access the internet? Because they merged the local music player and streaming music player.
So there's a ridiculous user experience and unnecessary deprecation, all because local functionality interacts with nonlocal functionality.
Kind of like an escape key on a keyboard.
Why would Apple keep hardware that most people didn't know about and didn't use?
I do miss the headphone jack, but clearly Apple is not bringing that back.
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 the virtual keyboard keys and improve typing accuracy. That's not what we got and I've found very little utility in the current implementation sadly.
It also makes it harder to get the screen replaced. Since I don't live near an Apple Store that's important to me. I want to be able to pop into a local locksmith and get them to change a broken screen while I wait. The alternative is either a long drive or sending the phone away for days on end.
If Apple really wanted to impress me they would replace the dictation key on the keyboard which I regularly trigger by accident with something useful like an Undo button. I have never used dictation so this is just a daily irritation to me.
So the cursor navigation feature activates on long press of the space bar, in iPhone models that don't have 3D touch?
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.
NO. Not only is this ridiculously cumbersome, but it's not marked on the keyboard. So 99+ % of Apple users undertake DOUBLE the keystrokes to arrow the cursor past the letters they want to delete and then use Apple's mislabeled Backspace key to get rid of them. I've been in the Apple store and heard a customer come in and ask if there's some way to configure the keyboard to have a legitimate Delete key.
Meanwhile everyone else manages to provide a real Delete key, even on SMALL laptops.
3D touch malfunctions badly with a slightly swelling battery pressing against the lcd backplate inside the phone. Or a bend in the phone chassis. The 6s case was bent for every person who carried it in their back pocket. I saw malfunctioning 3d touch several times every week back when I was in phone repair. Especially with carrier insurance refurbs, where the replacement parts were of especially poor quality. Carrier refurbs often had the cheapest batteries, screen assemblies and sometimes non original chassis.
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!
Mine is an iPhone 7 I bought refurbished back in February 2017. This phone is likely to have seen less use than a friend of mine's phone bought at the end of 2021. It spends 95% of its life connected to a power source (even when I actively use it), so I expect the battery to last quite some time.
According to my phone, over the last 10 days I had an average screen time of 3h34m per day. I use it to communicate and to consume media while commuting. I charge it whenever it needs some juice, it does get to down to 10%-20% sometimes.
But honestly I don't see how my usage can hurt it so much. And if my usage is indeed what damages the battery so much, then that seems to be Apples issue, considering how I'm really not a poweruser or whatever.
What battery health does your phone have? I can't imagine that having a phone connected to a power source 95% of its lifetime can be especially good for the battery.
What can be Apple's fault is the battery going to 10% after using it for 3h, but I don't think that's the point here.
> Letting it go down to 20% before charging it back up means the battery has to cycle
Apple actually says themselves, that "You complete one charge cycle when you’ve used (discharged) an amount that equals 100% of your battery’s capacity — but not necessarily all from one charge." [1]
The iPhone 12 mini has a 2,227mAh battery. Its battery health is at 86%, so effectively I have 1915mAh. But now you're also telling me that I can't use it past 20%, which leaves me with 1530mAh, or 68% of the original capacity.
I can totally agree that with long-term usage it's up to the user to optimize their battery usage for health. But my device was at 92% battery health after not even a full year and I simply won't accept that this is on me. Especially if we consider how expensive and complicated Apple makes it to replace a battery. Apple also tells me that I can charge my battery whenever I want.
To give more insight, GPS is fully disabled 99% of the time, it runs in dark mode, auto-brightness is disabled and I usually set it to a pretty low brightness, 5G is disabled and generally I remember disabling lots of things like "double tap to wake screen", "lift phone to wake screen" etc.
[1] https://www.apple.com/batteries/why-lithium-ion/
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 charge it back up, in 10 days you've used 10 cycles.
If every day it only loses 10% (total) and charge it back up, in 10 days, you've used 1 cycle.
I'm not saying "it's your fault" or that "you shouldn't do it", I'm talking about objective use of the battery.
Yeah, I know it's a mobile phone, so one of the reasons for buying that is to use while out and about.
But the point is that not everyone uses it that way, which can explain why some people see the battery health going down faster than others, on the same device.
And that's not Apple's fault. Sure, you could argue that the battery life is ridiculously short, that the battery's health shouldn't degrade as fast, and so on. And I'd agree with that. But still, it's a different issue.
> 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 their phones plugged in as much as they can, at least in my social circle and work environment.
I knew that I would have to live with shorter battery life when buying a small phone with a small battery and I also know that batteries just loose health and that this is normal. The drop on my device just makes me think that maybe my device has some kind of issue, or received a battery which would be placed on the left side of a bell curve.
Wanted to check the exact stats - So, I bought it in the end of April 2021. That's 16 months ago. If a 14% loss of battery health during that time is normal, then maybe I had wrong expectations. It just seems excessive when comparing with other people/devices.
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.
I know it's anecdotal, but I mostly keep my battery-powered electronics plugged-in when possible, and their batteries tend to degrade much less over the years compared to a friend's, who tends to unplug them and charge them when needed. And the electronics in question are fairly similar: iPhones and same-gen Macbooks.
Same for my work laptop (hp) which, after 4 years, still has around 80% of its original battery life, when my colleagues', who use them much more often on battery, only last around 50% of their new condition, if they weren't changed because of swelling.
The one kind of battery among mine that seem to have shorter lives are camera batteries. Which, of course, tend to get drained more since I don't have an outlet handy when out in the woods.
But I mostly do iOS software engineering, so the device spends most of it’s time plugged in.
In a few months, it won’t even need to try to stay under 80% anymore. It just will.
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.
I think the issue is more that it was not very discoverable. A bet the vast majority of non-tech users didn't even know it existed and perhaps accidentally activated 3D touch much to their confusion.
Removing it simplifies the hardware, avoids accidental activations and is less maintenance work.
I still miss 3D Touch :(. I am happy that Macs still have Force Touch, even though Force Touch and haptic feedback are criminally underused. There are so many useful applications, e.g. OmniGraffle gives subtle haptic feedback when dragging an object and it aligns with another object. It's such a nice feature that other apps could learn from.
It’s tough to sell a feature that has no interface. A little too minority report arm flailing for me :)
Baloney - it was the 6 Plus, not the 6S, and it was far more rare than twitter would have had you believe.
Apple has a problem with discoverability in quite a lot of features. There's many small little things in iOS that users don't know about and likely will never find out about, perhaps because they want to keep the UI clean.
There’s a whole Apple app - Tips - included with every iOS device, dedicated specifically to these small features.
It’s updated by Apple with new tips and tricks regularly, and you can choose to be notified each time a new ‘episode’ is released.
I imagine most iPhone users don’t know it is there!
On the one hand, thanks for the tip! On the other hand, Apple has an enormous discoverability problem, it's getting worse, and they're responding by making the UX dumber instead of addressing it head on.
This trackpad mode sounds interesting though, I'll try it :)
And nothing's changed since then. Sorry. It's too confusing.
Only now thanks to the OP I understand how to achieve this without 3D touch. Poor discoverability on this feature never ends.
First time trying it for me but it seems.. odd, maybe need to get used to it.
The prior mention of defining the start and end points of the selection is a bit more tricky and may not even be an actual feature, which involves moving the cursor around in a kind of handoff between start and stop point. That’s trickier to describe because it fellas like it may just be a quirky behavior that can be manipulated.
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, which is completely ignored for this auto-correct, it replaces it with German word, when I write English and sometimes with English words when I type German. Then this forced touch was helpful to select the letters/word to re-write it correctly to make the sentence meaningful. But now, this whole selection process is completely broken (for me). Since the removal of force touch, when I try to go to a specific spot, it selects parts of the sentence in a completely (for me) unpredictable way. Then I have no chance to un-select anymore, so I have to replace the whole. The experience is getting worse and worse.
I think peak iOS was in the past.
However, the points you make are absolutely right, and in addition it has recently developed the annoying trait of sometimes choosing to replace previous words that I have specifically typed and selected.
But I think it's great that the keyboard language does not define the autocorrect language.
The German keyboard has smaller-sized keys and it would drive me insane I think if I had to switch to the German keyboard in order to type German text.
For the special characters (é, à, etc), I long-press and choose whatever I need.
Since I hate typing on the phone, I quite like using the suggestions, especially for words with multiple special characters.
- 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/swipe. A good example just happened below; I tried typing “mid word” below, once I started swipe typing “word” iOS thought it would be a great idea to change “mid” to make it “miss words”. Thanks for the unhelp Apple.
- The random capitalizations for no apparent reason, sometimes even mid word, and no, not from accidentally hitting shift, even during swipe typing.
- The infuriating overbearing and downright evil efforts at speech and thought control. For example you can’t swipe type certain things Apple has clearly designated as wrongthink; assuming of course that the only possible reason someone would want to use the sequence of words Apple has designated as wrongthink is for purposes that violate their perspective of narrow utopian authoritarian society.
- That for some reason sooner rather specific acronyms seem to be prioritized over the most common words in the English language through inaccuracy. One example; try swipe typing “is” with some inaccuracy and you get “OSS” instead, ab rather obscure acronym to replace “is”, or OSS it?
- The concatenation of “a” (I think there are others I can’t recall) rather than automatically adding a space when there is a hyper (I think that’s what it’s going on), so e.g., “it’s a” turns into “it’sa” … “he’s a” “what’sa”
- I too have gotten the sense some of it may even have to do with or is exacerbated by using multiple keyboard languages. I love when the autocorrect “AI” substitutes words from a different language altogether, that’sa (that was organic, but left for sarcastic effect) really great feature! (Yes, that’s more sarcasm)
I've never had capitalization for no apparent reason (maybe I didn't pay enough attention), but I have a similar pet peeve, where the AI learns "a bit too much".
I write a lot of French, and a fairly common phrase I type is "c'est chiant" (that sucks). At first, it would try to autocorrect this to something else, probably because it's "not nice" to write that.
But after insisting on writing that for a while, it must have figured "ok, let him write that". Except that it learned the whole phrase, capitalized, because it's usually the first thing I type, so it automatically capitalizes the first letter (I always rely on automatic capitalization when writing informally).
But now when I want to write that in the middle of a sentence, it will auto-capitalize the C.
On other devices/keyboards (SwiftKey for example) I type a word and if it thinks I might mean something else, it shows up in a row of 3 suggestions above the keyboard. If it's correct, I tap the suggestion and it replaces whatever I'd actually typed.
Makes for easy fixes and only adds an extra "tap" if I see a mistake that needs to be corrected. Either way, beats backing up and retyping or jumping through hoops to remove "ducking" from the dictionary.
SwiftKey on Android (Microsoft) does the same thing to me on occasion. It is indeed very annoying.
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, you can long press on the space bar till you get haptic feedback, then you can move the caret around freely. However, if you want to select text, you need to use a second finger on the keyboard after you start moving the caret around, but honestly it's an absolute mess to use; try it out, I can guarantee you won't be able to select what you were planning on.
However, as much as I miss it every time I fail to accurately select text on iOS, I don't mourn its loss. Force Touch is adequate. It's just not a replacement, and seems a shame it was probably removed to reduce costs and hardware complexity, all at the cost of regression.
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 actually used to hit it accidentally more often when it was a 3D touch button rather than a delay-based button.
I just want a way to completely remove it for the majority of us who are not wandering around in pitch black.
I don’t think I’ve ever had the flashlight accidentally left on (not in a long time, anyway).
Force Touch is something supported by 2015+ MacBook trackpads (you can push harder to effectively middle-click something) and 3D Touch was the iPhone screen tech that did the same thing, which has been replaced with Haptic Touch (equivalent to Android's "long press").
It seems the selection can only grow and on both sides, which is the main problem.
If they showed the cursor with a different color than the selected text, and if they shrink and grow the selection as you move, I think it could be pretty nice: select the starting point of the selection, and select only what’s in between the original cursor and the moving one.
Alas it’s more like painting a selection at the moment, with an invisible brush.
With a traditional cursor, it places an anchor wherever you’ve moused down and then drags the selection around that anchor.
Whereas with Haptic Touch selection, there’s no anchor, so you find yourself selecting text you didn’t mean to. I’m sure that once you’ve gotten used to it, it’s a nice feature; but it’s not intuitive if you’re not accustomed to it (which seems to be the majority of folks).
iOS UI in a nutshell.
You can do most of the things that most users need to do just knowing how to tap icons and swipe up to go home. I don't think it's such a big issue that there are some power user features that you either discover by messing around or word of mouth.
I could have sworn it used to work like how you'd expect, where it's anchored from the place you started highlighting. I got my first iPhone, the 12 mini, when it came out. So end of 2020, and I thought that was how text selection worked when I first got it, then it seemed at some point, perhaps after an update it started working where it would only grow the selection and you couldn't unselect if you accidentally went too far. I thought they introduced a bug but it hasn't changed since then. I have no source for this, only my own memory, but maybe someone else can tell me I'm correct/incorrect about that?
The current implementation is way too hard to use. Especially if, for example, you're selecting something starting on the far right side of a line to the far left side of the same line. You have to thread the needle of the above and below lines like a game of Operation, because if you go too high or too low, you'll accidentally end up selecting that entire line.
Yes, it's slightly worse now but for a greater cause and the greater cause, IMHO, is the unified interaction model on mobile devices. If not all devices and apps are using it there's no reason to having it.
In the Android world there are tons of exotic stuff, novel ideas and even "standards" that go nowhere unless Apple implements it.
There is a magic in general availability. I think, if all Apple devices had it, it could have been possible to rely on its existence and build the UI with that assumption in mind. With just some devices having it, you need to have few versions of the UI to handle each case.
I think you misunderstood. This is not an argument for equality at all, the problem with patchy support is that few bother to implement features against because it costs time and money and as a result fades into usbcuirity.
Having uniform platform is a very effective for innovations success. It makes sense for Apple and the developers to have the hardware based 3D touch with a software based alternative so that it can work on all devices the same way.
The way you get there is by putting it into everything for several years.
Cutting it after three is the opposite of working for that greater cause.
Maybe the force the user can apply when iPad is on a table(no lever effect) and when is handheld(strong lever effect, user needs counterforce on the other end of the screen to achieve firm press) is far too different to reliably activate the gesture?
– Apple
Never been able to get the same size phone twice even if I wanted to.
That is not how I remember it. I remember text being selected left and right at random for no apparent reason when trying to move the cursor.
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.
Cynically, it feels like they think everyone should already "just know" how the various gestures work, which is obnoxious and user hostile.
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.
The shortcuts associated with menu items are shown in the menu item. I realize that there other discovery problems with keyboard shortcuts (on all platforms) but there is non-zero discoverability for "the most basic things" on Mac OS.
Gesture discoverability is much closer to zero, IMHO.
(yeah this is the computing equivalent of a locked file cabinet in a disused toilet stall in a dark basement with a sign on the door that says "Beware The Leopard")
OTOH it makes complete sense to have a look at the Trackpad pane to see how it works. It’s not like it’s hidden behind a defaults command line, and it even has movies. It’s much worse on phones.
What do you expect? Unskippable videos when you first set up a mac followed by a mandatory test that you have to pass before you can use the computer?
Everyone else does it worse, except maybe the VSCode command palette.
I’d like a Mark II version which also says “there is no such thing as Sunday 8th of August this year” so that I can fix my errors before they cause problems.
No matter how clever and subtle you think you're being, you're still just redirecting the user's attention from the task at hand toward the UI itself. No matter how ignorable, dismissable, or optional it is, it's an abysmal UI failure and it shouldn't even happen once. Make the feature right in the first place and you won't have to resort to nagging.
Isn't that the Tips App? I'm pretty sure it gets recommended every time you set up a new phone. Mine has a tip on using Haptic Touch with the keyboard to move the insertion point.
There is/was - it's called Tips, and most people ignore or uninstall it.
Some say it's why minesweeper et al were added to Windows, so people could learn how to use the mouse.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RvcwFYPiKKA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nV-d5F-AdX8
Apple Introduces Revolutionary New Laptop With No Keyboard https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9BnLbv6QYcA
"just few hundred clicks away"
The end. (I didn't even know about it until I finally switched to an iPhone Xs after years and years of lowest tear iPhones).
Currently it’s “long press”. I think they did this so they could remove the physical layer required for 3D Touch that took up space.
The UX was better for the force sensor though, it was instant feedback based on user action and didn’t require a delay to detect.
There's probably a way to make a lot of HN points just running a summarization model and posting the result as comment
Force Touch was the same tech as 3D Touch, first introduced on the watch. It was rebranded for the iPhone when the pressure sensitivity stuff was added.
It's current replacement is Haptic Touch.
"Both 3D Touch and Haptic Touch fall under the umbrella of Force Touch functionality. This is Apple's general name for its technology that lets input devices distinguish between different levels of pressure when you touch them."
https://www.makeuseof.com/apple-force-touch-3d-touch-haptic-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Force_Touch
So, 3D Touch was one implementation of Force Touch.
No kidding I just managed to make it bug out and crash safari
Better than I knew before, but not incredible. Would at least require letter by letter precision for that.
That behavior was very, very frustrating.
Now how as a "user of apple products for 8 years" was I supposed to guess this ? Thank you ! You made my day !