Regardless of the merits of an Action Button, the location and design is atrocious. Why place such a tiny button on the far top if it’s supposed to be for quick access? Just Apple marketing its way out of removing a switch, just like Dynamic Island actually taking up more screen estate than the notch.
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iPhone 15 Pro Action Button is a Horrible Idea
- Thread starter sherwinzadeh
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- action button mute switch
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My guy. It is what it is. There’s nothing you can do to change it.
You have three options(really 2)
1. Get a 15 and try it
2. Don’t get a 15
2a. Stay with your current phone and Get a 14
2b. Get another phone than has a physical switch.
I'd be much more interesting in an action button than the mute switch. My phone goes on mute when it first comes out of the box and goes off mute maybe twice a year. If I could get a button in its place that could launch an app of my choosing or even run a shortcut, that could be 100x more useful.
Not necessarily, you should be able to feel the vibration.
i’d be willing to bet that most people leave their phone on silent 99% of the time and never touch that switch. Now, you could leave it on silent and have a shortcut button instead. And if you want to use it for ring, silent, you still can. So I don’t really see what issue that creates. They’ve said that there will be a very clear way of knowing that it switched from ring to silent. As far as their reason for not doing both, it’s probably just to do with their simplicity design and not adding another button
I dunno about the Touch Bar. I’ve never particularly felt the need for F-keys on a Mac*, and a screen is better for the kinds of media control functions that Apple has used the F-keys for. When it comes to F-keys, I find that it’s usually bulky cross-platform (often ported from Windows) professional applications that use them (in my case, usually IDEs). I think Apple expected those types of applications to use the Touch Bar, which notionally should have been very useful as a contextual interface (to use the IDE example again, debugging controls would be great to have there and not have to use the mouse or four finger salutes to operate**). But it never really happened for some reason, and I think users with strong muscle memory probably hated it. (Though I never use F-keys even on Windows, I typically use a 60% keyboard.)
As for the mute switch, I just leave my phone on vibrate all the time. Avoids the faux pas of your phone suddenly ringing during a movie, work, church, etc., especially when it’s probably a scammer or telemarketer anyway. I’ve never felt the need to let notifications play sounds***, for instance. So I like the option of using it for other tasks. Using it as a camera shutter sounds nice, it’s always been a little weird to use the volume keys for that. Or the ability to launch Shortcuts, which is probably what I’ll actually do with it. Shortcuts is really powerful (Python scripts through Pythonista, JSON requests, RSS parsing, and web scraping [complete with a regex engine], x-callback-url support, launching shell scripts over SSH, the ability to run other shortcuts [and pass input into them] and a lot more, and the only one that I mentioned that isn’t included by default is Python support), and I used to have some serious automation set up in it back when it was a third party app.
* The first Mac keyboard to have F-keys was the Apple Extended Keyboard. Seems like there was a system extension that let you program them as shortcut keys. Cut, Copy, and Paste were commonly assigned to F1, F2, and F3, for instance. By the time the iBook came out, it had already become volume and brightness control, like it is today.
** Yeah, sure, you can always reassign shortcuts on a Mac, but the more keyboard shortcuts an app has, the harder it is not to find a conflict.
*** One of the most important steps to taming the number of notifications you get is to silence them and make some of them deliver quietly. Honestly, one of the most important aspects of my Apple Watch is that all the important notifications go to it. If it goes to my phone, it’s probably not that important. And it was probably a mistake to allow push notifications to play a sound in the first place, because that’s one of the aspects that drives phone overuse, especially with regards to social media apps. “Ooh, that sound means someone retweeted a tweet of mine! Time to open Twitter!****”
**** I don’t think I’ll ever call it X. What are you supposed to call an individual tweet on a service called X? But regardless, I’m glad I got rid of mine years ago. I’m about 6, almost 7, years clean. (And yeah, it really was an addiction for me.)
False presses? Yeah, use it every day and don’t recall ever a fall press.. it’s flat so do see how I can accidentally press it.
What kind of a psychopath still uses their phone on ringer in 2023 😬🤣🤣
Given how butt-freaking-stupid some of their "upgrades" have been in their software over the years, I bet they didn't give it much thought at all.
Pulling the phone out of your pocket to see if it muted will make your life much harder? I think you need to experience some adversity to put things in perspective.
From a design standpoint, the mute switch had one use — the action button has multiple uses, which is a much better use of space. Also, Watch has never had a mute switch — has this been a problem for you?
I actually don’t use any buttons on my iPhone — I do everything through assistive touch. But the action button will be useful for me, primarily with the camera.
From a design standpoint, the mute switch had one use — the action button has multiple uses, which is a much better use of space. Also, Watch has never had a mute switch — has this been a problem for you?
I actually don’t use any buttons on my iPhone — I do everything through assistive touch. But the action button will be useful for me, primarily with the camera.
I’m sorry, but this is a company that literally tests out hundreds of variations of the button press “feel” or sound it makes when considering hardware choices. That’s just a plain fact. The process has been documented dozens of times over the years. There is absolutely no chance this hasn’t been considered.
Meh another cheap-feeling button that I won't want to use because it will get even more loose and wobbly over time...
Based on his reply to every commenter who disagrees with him, OP clearly just wants to argue with everyone.
People get mad when Apple doesn't give people enough customization. Then they change a button to allow more customization and people then get mad about that. There's no winning.
I welcome this change for 2 reasons. First is the customization that I just mentioned. Secondly, I've owned iPhones since the 3GS and have always kept my phone on mute. The only exceptions in all those years were when a family member was sick, so I unmuted the phone overnight if they called while I was sleeping. That's it.
OP I'm sorry there's no more dedicated mute switch. You could buy the regular 15. Other than that, I think the only other phone on the market that has a physical switch for sound profiles is the Oneplus Nord 3.
People get mad when Apple doesn't give people enough customization. Then they change a button to allow more customization and people then get mad about that. There's no winning.
I welcome this change for 2 reasons. First is the customization that I just mentioned. Secondly, I've owned iPhones since the 3GS and have always kept my phone on mute. The only exceptions in all those years were when a family member was sick, so I unmuted the phone overnight if they called while I was sleeping. That's it.
OP I'm sorry there's no more dedicated mute switch. You could buy the regular 15. Other than that, I think the only other phone on the market that has a physical switch for sound profiles is the Oneplus Nord 3.
FBW provides lots of “feel” feedback in the controls. I hear FADEK is great, though I’ve never flown a plane with it. We adjust throttle control just fine the old fashion way. Personally, I’m not a fan of the glass cockpit and I find that I much prefer the scan. But hey, that’s just me.
Yes, it was more a tongue in cheek thing, not strictly accurate. I was just trying to point out what to me is the absurdity of buying a tech device while wanting certain things about it to remain the same.
I'll be honest, @sherwinzadeh - I'm not sure I'm smart enough to remember which mute button position means on and which means off. Just flipped mine back and forth several times and was immensely unclear on whether my phone was muted or unmuted. If you have mastered distinguishing that, I can appreciate why you might be bothered by the switch to a press-able button. As for me, I don't really want my phone ringing OR buzzing, so I'll probably use the Action button for something like Voice Memos, and switch it to Translation when I travel internationally... that's gonna a REALLY helpful use case for the global community.
Then explain removing the text selection magnifying glass (yes, I know they walked that one back because it was BUTT STUPID). Or changing “time since full charge” to the utterly inferior “screen on time.” Or the UX disaster that is known as changing your bloody wallpaper.
Don’t even get me started on the steaming mess that is Apple Music.
Remember how interactive widgets used to exist many years ago? I love how that was walked back so they could pitch it as some revolutionary upgrade now.
Or how about removing the original, genuinely innovative, genuinely beneficial MagSafe from MacBooks. Also glad they brought that back.
Or Stage Manager. Why does that exist on Mac when the existing Mission Control and Spaces already exists and is much more intuitive and effective?
Or on macOS notification banners, instead of just showing the usual two options, there are instead two buttons which both pull up the same two options. Horrendous UX design.
Seriously. If they are indeed thinking these things through, then they’re thinking with their asses. They are nowhere near the innovators they used to be and instead are in this infuriating habit of changing things, often for the worse, just to change things.
When the solution to the frustrations looks like the older version of the product, you KNOW they didn’t think it through.