The iPhone has ended with the start buttons, here is why I will miss it

For the first time since the iPhone debut in 2007, Apple no longer sells a smartphone with a start button. The 16E iPhone announced yesterday eliminates it. The elimination was very late, since it was overcome by all the controls of the touch screen many years ago. But while the start button ends, leaves an important legacy.

The start button was crucial for the first iPhone, but it was also discordant; No other phone at that time basically had no buttons. It was a necessary bet and innovation.

I returned and saw the original iPhone announcement to see how Steve Jobs threw it. “On the front, there is only one button there,” Jobs said. “We call it the start button. He takes you home from wherever you are. And that's all. “The first time he demonstrated it, he went up to the application for iPod and then clicks on the start button to return to the home screen.

I immediately made sense, and it is something that anyone could understand immediately. The start button caused the transition to smartphones and touch screens reorient yourself.

Apple, of course, not only used the start button to take it home. Over time, he added features such as keeping him pressed to talk to Siri on the iPhone 4s. Apple turned the button into a fingerprint sensor for a tactile identification with the iPhone 5s. And with the iPhone 7, the starting button technically ceased to be a real button: Apple used the mouth to simulate the feeling of pressing a mechanical button. But even with all that functionality, I could still use the start button as the best safety valve.

The start button was so good that Apple kept it basically the same for 10 years. But he had changed a lot at the end of that decade: the iPhone began to seem outdated with its large and thick bezels, and many Android phones had moved full screen designs. The start button, as useful as it was, made the iPhone seem behind its rivals.

With the iPhone x in 2017, a decade after the launch of the first iPhone, the company showed the start button aside in favor of a total screen screen and a persistent bar at the bottom of the screen. He was very skeptical when Apple dropped the start button with the iPhone x; There was simply no way that a small floating bar could be so easy to use as a button.

Years later, I still think that is true, but just. The bar works well as something to resort to, and many generations of iPhone, the vast majority of people have become accustomed to sliding to get home instead of mixing a button. Some features that used to live in the start button now work just as well in the sleep button / wake up. It is good to have the additional real estate sector without the start button at the bottom. And Face ID is possibly a better authentication system than Touch ID.

Apple should probably have dropped the start button a long time ago. (The company has now also moved mainly a ray). And even if I have not wanted to press a start button for a while, I will remember it with love now that it has left.