Removing 3D Touch seems like a horrible mistake. This is a pro-level feature that many of us have come to rely on every day.
I use 3D Touch many times per day in ways that I don't think can be replaced by haptic features.
For example in ProCreate, 3D Touch allows you to have pressure sensitivity while drawing or painting.
3D Touch is also very useful when editing text, since you can 3D Touch anywhere on the iOS virtual keyboard to transform it into a trackpad, letting you move the insertion point to exactly where you want it, and also letting you select text. I use this all the time.
The replacement is to "hold the spacebar" to activate that same mode—however, this causes your finger to start off at the bottom of the screen, meaning that you cannot drag very far downwards to select text.
Consider also that this gesture is often the ONLY way to scroll a text field on a website, due to all the broken HTML5 implementations that intercept your swipe gestures, and you quickly realize the scale and scope of a mistake it is to remove 3D Touch.
As well, there's an app I created that uses 3D Touch to people with certain types of hand injuries and deformities to perform actions that would normally require them to push an on-screen button (something they can't do while also holding the device). Now if someone buys a new device, it's not going to work. That's really crappy of Apple, IMHO.
Finally, for the cost of an iPhone Pro, users do not expect to lose features like this. It seems like Apple is just removing features to make more profit margin, after getting us hooked on a superior platform. This is the opposite of innovation.
After hearing of this, I googled it and saw many articles that said 3D Touch was only used for pop-up menus on app icons, and that many users didn't even know about it. Well obviously that's false—many apps like iMovie and Garage Band had 3D Touch support for editing things, it was brilliant. Not to mention it was amazing to finally get touch-sensitivity for art programs. Considering how many of us are artists and musicians that use these apps a lot, it seems like a really lame sacrifice.
To me, the solution would have been to enhance the UI further, to give better indications of when something is able to be "3D-touched". They should also add something useful to contextual menus, such as the suggestion I made to Apple several times that they keep ignoring, which is to let you send an app to a folder from that pop-up menu, instead of forcing you to drag it all the way across 10 pages of apps and folders that get all screwed up if you drop something in the wrong place.
So what did we get in exchange for losing 3D touch? A THIRD camera? Did we really need a third camera, really guys?
I use 3D Touch many times per day in ways that I don't think can be replaced by haptic features.
For example in ProCreate, 3D Touch allows you to have pressure sensitivity while drawing or painting.
3D Touch is also very useful when editing text, since you can 3D Touch anywhere on the iOS virtual keyboard to transform it into a trackpad, letting you move the insertion point to exactly where you want it, and also letting you select text. I use this all the time.
The replacement is to "hold the spacebar" to activate that same mode—however, this causes your finger to start off at the bottom of the screen, meaning that you cannot drag very far downwards to select text.
Consider also that this gesture is often the ONLY way to scroll a text field on a website, due to all the broken HTML5 implementations that intercept your swipe gestures, and you quickly realize the scale and scope of a mistake it is to remove 3D Touch.
As well, there's an app I created that uses 3D Touch to people with certain types of hand injuries and deformities to perform actions that would normally require them to push an on-screen button (something they can't do while also holding the device). Now if someone buys a new device, it's not going to work. That's really crappy of Apple, IMHO.
Finally, for the cost of an iPhone Pro, users do not expect to lose features like this. It seems like Apple is just removing features to make more profit margin, after getting us hooked on a superior platform. This is the opposite of innovation.
After hearing of this, I googled it and saw many articles that said 3D Touch was only used for pop-up menus on app icons, and that many users didn't even know about it. Well obviously that's false—many apps like iMovie and Garage Band had 3D Touch support for editing things, it was brilliant. Not to mention it was amazing to finally get touch-sensitivity for art programs. Considering how many of us are artists and musicians that use these apps a lot, it seems like a really lame sacrifice.
To me, the solution would have been to enhance the UI further, to give better indications of when something is able to be "3D-touched". They should also add something useful to contextual menus, such as the suggestion I made to Apple several times that they keep ignoring, which is to let you send an app to a folder from that pop-up menu, instead of forcing you to drag it all the way across 10 pages of apps and folders that get all screwed up if you drop something in the wrong place.
So what did we get in exchange for losing 3D touch? A THIRD camera? Did we really need a third camera, really guys?
