7 ms·

I wonder if reliability was a factor in ending this feature. 3D touch malfunctions badly with a slightly swelling battery pressing against the lcd backplate in

I wonder if reliability was a factor in ending this feature. 3D touch malfunctions badly with a slightly swelling battery pressing against the lcd backplate inside the phone. Or a bend in the phone chassis. The 6s case was bent for every person who carried it in their back pocket. I saw malfunctioning 3d touch several times every week back when I was in phone repair. Especially with carrier insurance refurbs, where the replacement parts were of especially poor quality. Carrier refurbs often had the cheapest batteries, screen assemblies and sometimes non original chassis.

josu 4y ago
3D touch added 14g (+10.8%) and 2mm (+3%) to the iPhone 6s vs the 6.
Reason077 4y ago
My daily phone is a beat-up iPhone X that I bought new on release, making it almost 5 years old. It has a cracked screen (dead OLED is slowly spreading out from the top-right corner), shattered back glass, battery at 81% health, and the earpiece speaker doesn’t work properly so to make a call I have to use a headset or speaker mode. But 3D Touch still works perfectly!
- 4ggr0 4y ago
  My iPhone 12 mini is a bit over 1.5yrs old and has a 86% battery health. I hope this trend does not continue as fast or I guess I'll have to replace it sooner than later.
  - mathieuh 4y ago
    That sounds pretty fast, my 12 Pro Max is roughly the same age and at 96%
    - vladvasiliu 4y ago
      What's usually missing from these comparisons is how long people are actually using the phone and how they handle the battery. Mine is an iPhone 7 I bought refurbished back in February 2017. This phone is likely to have seen less use than a friend of mine's phone bought at the end of 2021. It spends 95% of its life connected to a power source (even when I actively use it), so I expect the battery to last quite some time.
      - 4ggr0 4y ago
        > What's usually missing from these comparisons is how long people are actually using the phone and how they handle the battery According to my phone, over the last 10 days I had an average screen time of 3h34m per day. I use it to communicate and to consume media while commuting. I charge it whenever it needs some juice, it does get to down to 10%-20% sometimes. But honestly I don't see how my usage can hurt it so much. And if my usage is indeed what damages the battery so much, then that seems to be Apples issue, considering how I'm really not a poweruser or whatever. What battery health does your phone have? I can't imagine that having a phone connected to a power source 95% of its lifetime can be especially good for the battery.
        vladvasiliu 4y ago
        Letting it go down to 20% before charging it back up means the battery has to cycle, and as I understand, that's what "ages" it. And managing that is on you, it's not Apple's fault that you won't (or can't) plug it in. What can be Apple's fault is the battery going to 10% after using it for 3h, but I don't think that's the point here.
        4ggr0 4y ago
        I'm sorry, but how can it be my fault for using a device until it's battery is low-ish? > Letting it go down to 20% before charging it back up means the battery has to cycle Apple actually says themselves, that "You complete one charge cycle when you’ve used (discharged) an amount that equals 100% of your battery’s capacity — but not necessarily all from one charge." [1] The iPhone 12 mini has a 2,227mAh battery. Its battery health is at 86%, so effectively I have 1915mAh. But now you're also telling me that I can't use it past 20%, which leaves me with 1530mAh, or 68% of the original capacity. I can totally agree that with long-term usage it's up to the user to optimize their battery usage for health. But my device was at 92% battery health after not even a full year and I simply won't accept that this is on me. Especially if we consider how expensive and complicated Apple makes it to replace a battery. Apple also tells me that I can charge my battery whenever I want. To give more insight, GPS is fully disabled 99% of the time, it runs in dark mode, auto-brightness is disabled and I usually set it to a pretty low brightness, 5G is disabled and generally I remember disabling lots of things like "double tap to wake screen", "lift phone to wake screen" etc. [1] https://www.apple.com/batteries/why-lithium-ion/ https://www.apple.com/batteries/why-lithium-ion/
  - rez9x 4y ago
    I bought my 12 Mini at launch and it's at 84% capacity. If I'm remembering correctly, it was at around 86% at the start of this year. There were some battery drain issues in different versions of iOS 14 and I believe there was some unnecessary wear in there, as well as a couple 'recalibrations' of battery health in iOS. Maybe the phone was falsely reporting 100% at release and was corrected to a lower percentage. I'd be curious to see if anyone with a fall 2020 still has over 90% battery health.
  - skoskie 4y ago
    Just adding my +1 to this issue. iPhone 12 mini at 83% health is really low after such a short period of time.
microtonal 4y ago
I wonder if reliability was a factor in ending this feature. I think the issue is more that it was not very discoverable. A bet the vast majority of non-tech users didn't even know it existed and perhaps accidentally activated 3D touch much to their confusion. Removing it simplifies the hardware, avoids accidental activations and is less maintenance work. I still miss 3D Touch :(. I am happy that Macs still have Force Touch, even though Force Touch and haptic feedback are criminally underused. There are so many useful applications, e.g. OmniGraffle gives subtle haptic feedback when dragging an object and it aligns with another object. It's such a nice feature that other apps could learn from.
- code_runner 4y ago
  I’m a tech user and barely knew this feature existed. I noticed it wasn’t there yesterday because I didn’t accidentally engage it like I normally do. It’s tough to sell a feature that has no interface. A little too minority report arm flailing for me :)
happyopossum 4y ago
> The 6s case was bent for every person who carried it in their back pocket Baloney - it was the 6 Plus, not the 6S, and it was far more rare than twitter would have had you believe.
- IncandescentGas 4y ago
  You're probably thinking of the bend gate controversy, where the bend in the case in the plus model was severe enough to damage the logic board. That, also, was not rare. We saw it constantly in the shop. Nearly every iphone 6, 6s or 6p that entered the shop had a bent case to some degree.

josu 4y ago

3D touch added 14g (+10.8%) and 2mm (+3%) to the iPhone 6s vs the 6.

Reason077 4y ago

My daily phone is a beat-up iPhone X that I bought new on release, making it almost 5 years old. It has a cracked screen (dead OLED is slowly spreading out from the top-right corner), shattered back glass, battery at 81% health, and the earpiece speaker doesn’t work properly so to make a call I have to use a headset or speaker mode. But 3D Touch still works perfectly!

4ggr0 4y ago
My iPhone 12 mini is a bit over 1.5yrs old and has a 86% battery health. I hope this trend does not continue as fast or I guess I'll have to replace it sooner than later.
- mathieuh 4y ago
  That sounds pretty fast, my 12 Pro Max is roughly the same age and at 96%
  - vladvasiliu 4y ago
    What's usually missing from these comparisons is how long people are actually using the phone and how they handle the battery. Mine is an iPhone 7 I bought refurbished back in February 2017. This phone is likely to have seen less use than a friend of mine's phone bought at the end of 2021. It spends 95% of its life connected to a power source (even when I actively use it), so I expect the battery to last quite some time.
    - 4ggr0 4y ago
      > What's usually missing from these comparisons is how long people are actually using the phone and how they handle the battery According to my phone, over the last 10 days I had an average screen time of 3h34m per day. I use it to communicate and to consume media while commuting. I charge it whenever it needs some juice, it does get to down to 10%-20% sometimes. But honestly I don't see how my usage can hurt it so much. And if my usage is indeed what damages the battery so much, then that seems to be Apples issue, considering how I'm really not a poweruser or whatever. What battery health does your phone have? I can't imagine that having a phone connected to a power source 95% of its lifetime can be especially good for the battery.
      - vladvasiliu 4y ago
        Letting it go down to 20% before charging it back up means the battery has to cycle, and as I understand, that's what "ages" it. And managing that is on you, it's not Apple's fault that you won't (or can't) plug it in. What can be Apple's fault is the battery going to 10% after using it for 3h, but I don't think that's the point here.
        4ggr0 4y ago
        I'm sorry, but how can it be my fault for using a device until it's battery is low-ish? > Letting it go down to 20% before charging it back up means the battery has to cycle Apple actually says themselves, that "You complete one charge cycle when you’ve used (discharged) an amount that equals 100% of your battery’s capacity — but not necessarily all from one charge." [1] The iPhone 12 mini has a 2,227mAh battery. Its battery health is at 86%, so effectively I have 1915mAh. But now you're also telling me that I can't use it past 20%, which leaves me with 1530mAh, or 68% of the original capacity. I can totally agree that with long-term usage it's up to the user to optimize their battery usage for health. But my device was at 92% battery health after not even a full year and I simply won't accept that this is on me. Especially if we consider how expensive and complicated Apple makes it to replace a battery. Apple also tells me that I can charge my battery whenever I want. To give more insight, GPS is fully disabled 99% of the time, it runs in dark mode, auto-brightness is disabled and I usually set it to a pretty low brightness, 5G is disabled and generally I remember disabling lots of things like "double tap to wake screen", "lift phone to wake screen" etc. [1] https://www.apple.com/batteries/why-lithium-ion/ https://www.apple.com/batteries/why-lithium-ion/
- rez9x 4y ago
  I bought my 12 Mini at launch and it's at 84% capacity. If I'm remembering correctly, it was at around 86% at the start of this year. There were some battery drain issues in different versions of iOS 14 and I believe there was some unnecessary wear in there, as well as a couple 'recalibrations' of battery health in iOS. Maybe the phone was falsely reporting 100% at release and was corrected to a lower percentage. I'd be curious to see if anyone with a fall 2020 still has over 90% battery health.
- skoskie 4y ago
  Just adding my +1 to this issue. iPhone 12 mini at 83% health is really low after such a short period of time.

microtonal 4y ago

I wonder if reliability was a factor in ending this feature. I think the issue is more that it was not very discoverable. A bet the vast majority of non-tech users didn't even know it existed and perhaps accidentally activated 3D touch much to their confusion. Removing it simplifies the hardware, avoids accidental activations and is less maintenance work. I still miss 3D Touch :(. I am happy that Macs still have Force Touch, even though Force Touch and haptic feedback are criminally underused. There are so many useful applications, e.g. OmniGraffle gives subtle haptic feedback when dragging an object and it aligns with another object. It's such a nice feature that other apps could learn from.

code_runner 4y ago
I’m a tech user and barely knew this feature existed. I noticed it wasn’t there yesterday because I didn’t accidentally engage it like I normally do. It’s tough to sell a feature that has no interface. A little too minority report arm flailing for me :)

happyopossum 4y ago

> The 6s case was bent for every person who carried it in their back pocket Baloney - it was the 6 Plus, not the 6S, and it was far more rare than twitter would have had you believe.

IncandescentGas 4y ago
You're probably thinking of the bend gate controversy, where the bend in the case in the plus model was severe enough to damage the logic board. That, also, was not rare. We saw it constantly in the shop. Nearly every iphone 6, 6s or 6p that entered the shop had a bent case to some degree.