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Comment by jbob2000 | Hacker News Reader

jbob2000

I remember reading that the reason for getting rid of the home button is that certain cultures around the world strictly do not use it, out of fear that it might break and require repairs. Instead, they use the on-screen accessibility button to replace the features of the home button.

The fear of using the home button has gotten so bad that even store employees are recommending to use the accessibility button and advise against pressing the hardware switch.

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They already got rid of the actual physical switch in the iPhone 7. It's now a touch and pressure sensitive area that uses the vibrator to make it feel like it clicks.

I was just going to say that same thing. Unfortunately, the chains of habit are generally to small to feel until they are to hard to break. Even with this change in hardware, how many will change this ingrained habit of theirs?

I worked in an office made up of mostly Indian people and I can confirm they used the on-screen accessibility button instead of the physical button.

Yes irrespective of that blocking the real estate, I've seen a lot of people using it for the first most belief that the power button's life extends since used less and then proximity of the on-screen button is relatively closer than the power button. Even people use it to activate siri rather than home button.

My mechanical home button always broke around the 20 month mark... combined with the shrinking battery life it always gave me a reason to upgrade. Now with the 7's non mechanical button and armed with a battery pack, i may never be forced to upgrade due to wear and tear.

This fear is well founded. Assuming that a person doesn't accidentally crack their screen the first thing to break on an iPhone is the home button. Long time heavy users of iPhones almost always have to resort to the accessibility buttons.

I believe this was true of the first few generations of iPhones, but is no longer the case

I have never encountered this myself nor heard of it happen to anyone I know.

You have now. That's -exactly- why I use the onscreen accessibility menu.

I figure, given how many times a day I use the home button, if I can half that, I double the lifespan of the device (over my previous iDevice, on which the home button stopped working & I thus had to throw out).

One outlier doesn't translate to "long time heavy users of iPhones almost always [do]".

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