The real question is if they will admit it was a misstep by removing it from their flagship model or just keep pretending and keep it in. Companies really hate admitting they were wrong so my bet is that they are stuck with it for the forseeable future.
The current CEO of Apple is the former COO, someone well regarded for his prowess in managing Apple's supply chain and determining optimal cost per unit for Apple's products.
If only a small percentage of customers use 3D Touch and 3D Touch adds a substantial cost per unit, I can see why Mr. Cook would disagree with 3D Touch being an awesome addition.
I personally use 3D Touch to open links in new tabs in Safari, but that's only because 3D Touch interferes with the long press gesture.
Yeah, but there is a difference between a software feature that, once written, would generally take more effort to remove, and a hardware feature that costs money for every unit you ship.
That seems to be a thing with Apple in general. For example, I just recently discovered that by holding "option" while clicking the "Format" drop-down on the Preview program's Export screen, you can get additional formats to appear, magically. For "advanced" users I'm guessing?
How the hell was I supposed to know that ??? Where else can I see additional things by holding down "option" ???
Yes, Apple is simple, but there's a lot of cute little hidden things that you can do by combining option/apple under the right circumstance. I feel like I'm playing Super Mario Bros. and jumping wildly into the air to hit some hidden block.
It gives you (a bit of) pressure sensitivity in painting apps (Sketches, Paper, Procreate).
Looks like this:
https://i.imgur.com/eX2bfHp.jpg
The blue dot is always there, but the four way arrows only appear after you press it, and you can drag further away to move faster, or closer to move slower.
It is one of these things that after you use it you wonder why everyone hasn't copied it yet. Microsoft's keyboard is actually the best thing on Windows Mobile.
I still want gesture based typing (Swype) on the Surface Pro. The on screen keyboard is substantially worse on full Windows 10 than it is on Windows 10 Mobile, it makes no sense at all...
What the heck Microsoft? Why is a keyboard on a 5" device better than a keyboard on a 10" one?
Patents are very possible
The patent was initially filed in 1990 and granted in 1996. So it should have expired in 2013. It seems to be owned by Lexmark (which was owned by IBM.)
Maybe I should check the documentation, but this also highlights the discoverability problem of 3D Touch. I guess I need to get in the habit of trying to "3D Touch" all over the place to find new features?
This video explains how to activate it for those who haven't used it before.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQpCPOSCu10
Edit: I wasn't aware of the double peek to select whole sentences. Cool.
would have worked better with a button on the keyboard that turns it into a trackpad.
It's really nice to be able to move the cursor and select text so easily and fast. It feels like a hack.
What?
They regularly withhold features from cheaper versions to achieve better margins and lower the cost, nothing about them being bad.
And nothing about 3D Touch being bad. Where did you ever get that?
That doesn't make them bad -- just hard to discover.
Once you find out about them, they are dead easy.
Not all UIs have to be immediately apparent, UI design is also about teaching users new idioms. Pointing with a mouse was alien once too...
Another example, a great feature in Google Maps on mobile is the ability to zoom with one hand. You double tap and drag (tap, tap-and-hold, drag), but I only figured this out because some blog talked about it. From what I can tell there are no instructions in the app that tell you about this feature, and I see this as being in the same vein as 3D touch. Sure it's great, but if people don't know about it or can't learn about it easily, they won't reap the benefits.
It's fine for secondary controls (other ways to zoom). I'd say Google learned the lesson with the now discontinued Menu button on Android. Application authors would sometimes hide critical functionality behind a Menu button press, and sometimes the Menu button did nothing. This lack of discoveribility and inconsistency is bad for User Interaction
This is a native Android gesture, by the way, and works in most apps and web-pages. It used to work on HN, but stopped when they changed the markup to be more mobile-friendly.
Someone shows you, you see someone do it, you accidentally press and activate it, you watch the introductory "wizard", you see it in an iPhone ad -- there are literally tons of ways.
Including the one everybody hates, RTFM...
What I mean by that is that OS X has hundreds of small features, keystrokes and affordances that are probably documented somewhere, but that I and most other people tend to find either by accident or by being told about them.
Apple's products have always been this way, and I rather like it. It is similar to my learning experiences with physical tools - over time, I've found a lot of tricks and 'off-label' uses for various woodworking tools by experience, and the OS sort of mimics that process.
For whatever reason, it doesn't work as well on the phone. I suspect it is partly that I don't spend hours at end doing things with my phone - I look something up, send a text, call someone, whatever and put it back in my pocket. A second factor is I almost never do complicated things on a phone. I have edited code in vi and then pushed/deployed it from my 6s, but not by choice, and that's not even that complicated.
So I do think discoverability is somewhat worse on a phone, at least for the way I use one, and it seems like an indirect form-factor consequence. It isn't that the form factor can't be used for complex tasks, but it is much more comfortable elsewhere, so the phone stays relegated to simpler stuff, which doesn't lead to the same degree of discovery/experimentation/happy accidents.
You can quickly switch apps using 3D Touch? How?
I think it's more about segmentation. For people who prefer smaller phones, there is still a reason to go for an iPhone 6s with a higher price point anyway. If the se was exactly the same except screen size, it might cannibalize the 6s.
That said, I've never used it on the iPhone -- if anything, Force Touch only gave us some shortcuts to actions that long-time users have already acquired "muscle memory" to perform differently (and without significantly more steps).
Force Touch is just a menu button. Only it's a menu button that's extremely fussy and difficult to use.
I actually struggle to save my workouts on the Watch because after a workout when I'm sweaty and breathing heavily, it's damn near impossible to bring up the menu and save the workout.
The Watch would be a better device if it had a hardware menu button instead of Force Touch.
Same goes for the iPhone. Force Touch is only useful for bringing up the app shortcut menu, and for positioning the cursor in a text field. Those are important but utterly mundane features. You don't need a sophisticated force-sensitive screen to bring up a menu for move a cursor, and those features would be easier to use if they were not implemented using Force Touch.
1. Speed. The delay between a force touch and the haptic feedback is often measured in seconds rather than milliseconds, particularly when the watch has been inactive for a period of time. That kind of delay is frankly outrageous. The haptic feedback needs to be instantaneous to be effective, even if it takes the actual software longer to wake up and respond.
2. Tap vs. Scroll. Unlike the iPhone, the Watch does an especially poor job of distinguishing between tap and scroll gestures. If your finger isn't perfectly still the software will treat it as a scroll gesture, and no amount of force will override it.
Pairing those two behaviors can produce some frustrating user experiences.
On the original iPhone, Apple did an amazing job of producing a very fluid and responsive UI on very humble and underpowered hardware. They've been less successful at doing the same with the Watch hardware.
I for one hope they keep it around and just work to improve it's accuracy and discoverability in future iterations.
> The real question is if they will admit it was a misstep by removing it from their flagship model or just keep pretending and keep it in.
They're talking about removing it from the flagships in the FUTURE. Specifically the 7 and 7 Plus later this year.