Admittedly, I do not have the same kind of history with the iPhone’s Home button as lifelong iPhone owners. I was there for a moment with the iPod touch and then, briefly, the iPhone 4S. I went back to Android. But I realize what a big deal it is that Apple has done away with the last remaining evidence of the old iPhone, especially since it was immortalized in the third-generation iPhone SE.
The Home button has been officially retired now that the iPhone 16e is out, and the iPhone SE 3 is, as once uttered on Laguna Beach, “dunzo.” The internet is not happy about it. Blogs and Reddit posts have been published speaking out against this great injustice done to fan service. How could a button once considered crucial to navigating the walled garden become extinct?
Most of us have been without it for a long time now. The last flagship iPhone with a physical Home button was the iPhone 8/8 Plus in 2017. So much has happened since then. Babies have been born, and empires have crumbled. Not only has Apple since eschewed the Home button from the iPhone lineup, but it also replaced it with other buttons on the iPhone: the Action button and, more recently on the iPhone 16, the Camera Control button, which people are still figuring out in some capacity (I certainly am—it’s placed in kind of a funny area).
People are upset because the Home button was a helper. I get that. It encouraged our elders to transition to a new digital way of life while offering a link to the past through a physical button that could clear the screen and take you back to the front page. But all good things must come to an end, especially as they evolve. The world is evolving into ambient computing; even Apple has acquiesced by branding it Apple Intelligence. If you really need a home button, the iPhone 16e has an Action button, which can be programmed to take you back to the front page of iOS. There are solutions to these problems.
On the iPhone 16e, Apple swapped out the iPhone SE 3’s Touch ID fingerprint with a better, faster Face ID that remains unparalleled compared to similar face recognition technologies. Face ID is such a significant part of the Apple experience that the company developed a specific camera module and put it into the iPhone 16e because it’s a marquee feature of being an iPhone user. The Home button is no longer a part of that narrative.
When Android users lost physical buttons—we lost an actual SCROLLING BUTTON with the end of the Nexus One—we had to adjust, too. It was not easy. Frankly, I was shoved into it before I was even ready to go on-screen navigation only. At least iPhone users have had years to transition out.