If Apple removes volume buttons from the iPhone 15 Pro, the phone will be less usable, and competitors will follow suit
There’s a certain dream aesthetic for the best iPhone that Apple has kept in mind since the first iPhone, and towards which it bends the phone market. There is no doubt some future iPhone beyond the iPhone 15 will have no bezels, no ports, and no switches of any kind. If it drops the physical buttons, the iPhone 15 Pro will represent the dawn of Apple’s nightmarish button-free world.
The iPhone of Apple dreams is a solid sheet of glass with no adornments, nothing to distract you from the elegant simplicity and the content it displays. It is the futuristic phone you imagine patrons of the space station bar holding when they get a call from work that distracts them from the blue glowing liquid in the glass. You don’t hold it so much as let it hover in your hand before your face.
Apple’s iPhone of the future is Schrödinger’s iPhone. It both exists and does not exist. The moment that you observe it is the moment of creation or destruction. Like Schrödinger’s cat, it’s also a useful theory that won’t be worth much in practice. We can be sure the iPhone will be surpassed by Apple Glasses before we ever need a respite from mining water ice from asteroids.
That’s why the button-free iPhone seems almost cruel. Why bother at this point? Why push users towards a terrible interface decision if modern interface designs have a terminal diagnosis already? Apple should let people enjoy phones as they are and save the big changes for the next generation of mobile technology. Losing buttons is just a bad idea all around.A button-free iPhone still has too many buttons
Even if Apple removes the volume rocker and the power button from future iPhones, the phone will still have too many buttons. Hundreds too many. The entire display is a button, and not just one. Every pixel can be a button. A touch display is a massive, super-sensitive button, for better and for worse.
A touch display is inarguably fantastic for its ability to create buttons and an interface that can change and adapt. It is literally like a fantasy, the way using a touchscreen can feel like casting spells.
A touch display is also unforgivably difficult for people with motor precision issues, visual ability differences, and other needs that have been sidelined by Apple’s aspirational design.
