Authoritative insider Ming-Chi Kuo shared fresh information about the upcoming iPhone 15 models. According to him, future smartphones will lose physical buttons.
Instead, the volume control and the power button will be touch-sensitive, like Touch ID in the iPhone 7 and 8, as well as SE 2 and SE 3. In these iPhones, the Taptic Engine vibration motor was responsible for the pressing effect, which very reliably imitates pressing the button. Its shipments will be increased by Luxshare ICT and AAC Technologies, which are already forecasting an increase in profits in the second half of 2023.
There are questions about this decision. For example, how to turn on the iPhone if it is turned off? Or how to do a hard reset when the iPhone does not respond to anything- this happens rarely but is periodically required.
Apple will probably come up with something. The power button sensor may always be active. The main thing is that he does not hang.
By the way, Ming-Chi Kuo believes that after such a decision by Apple, Android manufacturers will also switch to vibration motors. But will their choices be just as excellent? So far, no one has been able to replicate the Taptic Engine in their products.
Another innovation is Type-C. Mr. Kuo does not name specific models that will receive this connector instead of Lightning, so it will likely be rolled out to all four models simultaneously.
According to Ming-Chi, these two innovations will be the main factors in promoting future models. True, after the release of the basic tenth-generation iPad, many had concerns about the speed of USB Type-C – it may well turn out to be as slow as Lightning:
Therefore, it is not at all a fact that we will all be happy with the introduction of this connector. After all, EU legislators did not say anything about the standards and protocols with which this connector should work.
By the way, Type-C in the iPhone is not with us for long. Mark Gurman from Bloomberg claims that iPhones will soon lose connectors altogether:
The release of a smartphone without connectors in no way contradicts recent European legislation, so this connector will not live as long as 30-pin and Lightning did.