Would You Buy an iPhone With No Real Buttons?
Here's a question you've probably never considered before: Would you buy a new iPhone if it didn't have any physical buttons? Sure, the part of the phone you interact with most is the touchscreen, so maybe it doesn't seem like such a big deal. But think about it: The side button, volume buttons, Action button, and Camera Control button would no longer click. Could you live without the clutter?
While Apple sells no such iPhone, and likely won't release one next year, it very well might roll out a buttonless iPhone in 2027—at least, physically buttonless. That year will mark the 20th anniversary of the iPhone, and it'll come as no surprise that rumors suggest Apple is planning something special for the "iPhone 20." And that something might include ditching all the mechanical buttons and replacing them with haptics.
A truly buttonless iPhone
If you owned an iPhone 7 or iPhone 8, you'll understand the idea here. Those iPhones replaced the mechanical Home button with a solid state haptic button. Essentially, Apple used clever haptic vibrations to create the illusion of a button press, but, in fact, the "button" doesn't move at all. You'll realize this if the phone is completely off: The once pressable Home button doesn't actually do anything. It's the same case with any MacBook released over the past decade: Your trackpad isn't actually a button, so when the computer is off, the glass doesn't move.
The suggestion that the iPhone 20 will replace all of its buttons with this type of tech comes from leaker Instant Digital, who has previously claimed Apple intend to build a button-free iPhone. In the past, Instant Digital only confirmed vague plans by Apple to create such a phone sometime in the future, but this week, the leaker was more definitive: In a post on Weibo, Instant Digital asserted that Apple has "completed functional verification" for these haptic buttons, and is planning for "mass production and application" with the iPhone 20. All of the buttons, from the Side button to the Camera Control buttons, would adopt this technology.
Interestingly, Instant Digital claims Apple will bridge the gap by simplifying the structure of the Camera Control button in next year's iPhone 18. Apple might remove the capacitive sensing layer of the button and keep just the pressure sensitivity. We'll have to see whether other rumors confirm this.
Would you buy a buttonless iPhone 20?
The iPhone 20 unveil is nearly two years away, and all rumors should be taken with a grain of salt. Apple might have big plans in store for this iPhone, but haptic buttons might not have anything to do with them. But let's assume for the sake of argument that Apple does exactly what Instant Digital suggests. Would you buy it?
This would be a fundamentally different experience from any other iPhone, or really, any other smartphone. Even if you once had an iPhone with a haptic Home button, you've always had physical buttons to control the volume, to call up Siri, or to shut down your device. Those experiences would feel different, and could be more difficult to use just by feel alone, unless Apple makes each "button" physically obvious.
It also calls into question how one would perform any hardware tasks that currently require physical buttons. Once Apple removed the physical Home button, you couldn't use it to reset the iPhone, so Apple gave the volume button that job instead. But if all buttons aren't really buttons anymore, how would you reset the iPhone if the screen becomes unresponsive? Plug it into a computer? Take it to an Apple Store? Say a prayer? My guess is Apple will have a solution, but at the moment, it's not clear what it would be.
Personally, I don't think the change would influence my buying decision one way or the other. I'm hopelessly stuck in Apple's ecosystem, so I'll likely upgrade whenever my current iPhone bites the dust. If my options at that point include an iPhone without buttons, so be it, but I wonder if other iPhone users feel the same. (Plenty of you are still mourning the loss of the headphone jack.)