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Comment by Baeocystin | Hacker News Reader

One of the most important accessibility features they could bring back are physical home buttons on at least one ipad.

I am completely serious. I work with a lot of older adults, many of whom have cognitive challenges, and the lack of a physical button to press as an escape hatch when they get confused is the #1 stumbling block by a mile.

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When there were physical buttons, it was very popular in Asia to enable the accessibility option to put a virtual one on screen instead, because they were afraid the physical one would break. So it was kind of useless in the end.

> because they were afraid the physical one would break

On early models it was actually quite common for the button to stop working after a year or two. The durability has since improved, but habits die hard.

I have a pet-theory that certain older folks are cautious with technology because they grew up with stuff that would break expensively if you pressed the buttons in the wrong order.

Then when they see younger people just randomly explore-clicking to get things working--because their experience is that it's a safe tactic--that can gets misinterpreted as expertise, leading to: "Wow, kids these days just know technology."

It actually improved by no longer being a real button, instead it was a fake indent with a pressure sensor that did a haptic "click". But it still took up a lot of space on the front.

It’s not physical, but if the problem is they need something visible rather than a gesture, then you can put an always-on menu button on the screen that has a home button in.

https://support.apple.com/en-sg/111794

I agree. I have a last gen base iPad with Touch ID and a home button. I am pretty tech savvy but actually prefer this form factor.

Touch ID is so drastically superior to Face ID in so many common “iPad scenarios”, eg. laying in bed with face partially obscured.

I don’t understand Apple’s intense internal focus on FaceID only. FaceID with TouchID as an option when a device is flat on the table or when your face is obscured is so much nicer.

FaceID builds profitable user habit loops. More real-estate on the screen to show things, easier to thoughtlessly purchase things if your password is a glance at the camera, etc.

I don't think this is a user-focused decision, I believe it's a profit-focused one.

You can't buy things just by looking at the camera, there are forced button presses and the App Store tends to make you enter your password.

> I don’t understand Apple’s intense internal focus on FaceID only.

It isn't. Just a few days ago the new iPad Air has Touch ID.

Only iPad Pro uses Face ID. For iPad Pro users who use it for work and unlock it hundreds of times a day when in an office or during a commute, Face ID is vastly superior.

I actually can’t use Touch ID, at least year-round.

I have naturally very dry skin, and no matter how much moisturizer I used in colder months, I had to constantly have it relearn my fingerprint, to the point where I would just give up and use a passcode instead.

Face ID, on the other hand, has been flawless since my first phone with it in 2018 (minus some mask-related challenges during the pandemic). It and ProMotion are basically the two reasons I bought an iPad Pro over an iPad Air.

My mother had the same issue. TouchID would stop recognizing her finger less than a day after setting it up.

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