New iPhones Will Replace 3D Touch With Haptic Touch
Juli Clover reports for MacRumors that 3D Touch has been removed from the new iPhones, replaced with Haptic Touch.
This strikes me as a mistake. 3D Touch is a power user feature: It’s not discoverable, and it often just lets you accomplish things faster than the conventional route. iOS needs more, not less, power users features. The platform already buckles under any even remotely complicated task (“select all” in a list anyone?).
My guess is this is a symptom of a larger problem: Apple, like the rest of the tech industry, is increasingly making decisions based on usage analytics. In other words, less popular features get deprioritized1 at best, and at worst, cut. The problem with basing these decisions only on popularity is that not all users are equally valuable. Power users are an order of magnitude more valuable. They’re the ones that build websites to evangelize your platform, and even more importantly create the content for your platform. The measure of a platform is not how popular its features are, it’s what the most capable users of your platform can accomplish.
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Other examples of neglected power user features (all on macOS) include AppleScript, Services, and advanced window management. ↩︎