In fact, for friends who are used to 3D Touch, 3D Touch is really a very useful function, and it is also an artifact to eat chicken. So many people regret that Apple canceled 3D Touch.
So what kind of consideration does Apple want to cancel 3D Touch? Let's talk about this problem briefly today.
It may not be what many friends think. 3D Touch was first applied by Apple to MacBook Pro and Apple Watch 2 released in March 2005+2065438. The earliest appearance of this technology in public view can be traced back to 20 13.
Apple introduced the touchpad for the first time in the 20 13 patent document with the patent number D674382: the glass touchpad can not only play the role of physical buttons, but also recognize multi-touch.
The touchpad on the Mac is stress-free, equivalent to a touch screen. Apple named it "forced touch touchpad". Simply put, a speed sensor and a Taptic engine are used under the Mac touchpad. The force sensor detects the deformation of the touchpad when the user presses hard, and then the Taptic Engine vibration engine cooperates to realize touch feedback, so that the user can feel the touch of clicking.
The principle of implementation on Apple Watch and iPhone is the same. That is, a strain gauge deformation sensing layer is added at the bottom of the screen to detect the deformation caused by the user clicking on the screen, and then the touch feedback is realized with the Taptic Engine vibration engine. Users can realize the interaction between "Peek light pressure" and "Pop heavy pressure".
This three-dimensional touch technology, which is realized by adding vertical heavy press to short press and long press, has high hopes from Apple and is regarded as an interactive revolution that changes the world.
1. Reduce cost and increase output.
The realization of 3D touch is at the hardware level, and the biggest change is to add a layer of strain gauge deformation sensor under the screen. The pressure coefficient of the screen is calculated by measuring the deformation of the screen when it is pressed by hardware.
However, the application of this hardware on iPhone not only greatly increases the product cost, but also brings great problems to the product yield.
The first batch of iPhone 6s users may be particularly impressed, and the shortage of iPhone 6s in the previous period was particularly serious. This problem is not only insufficient production capacity, but more importantly, product yield.
2. Make up for the experience through software
Apple pursues user experience, but cares more about product profit. Nature can save money. It's not 3D Touch, but Hapic touch. This concept was first packaged in iPhone XR. Unlike the heavy 3D interaction of 3D Touch, Hapic touch is a two-dimensional interaction with long press on the plane. Chinese names may better reflect their differences. 3D Touch and Hapic touch are called "3D Touch" and "Touch Touch" respectively.
Unlike the real-time interaction of 3D Touch, Hapic touch has a sense of delay in use. Moreover, since Apple cancelled the strain gauge deformation sensor at the bottom of the screen, Hapic touch is completely interactive on the software level. That is, through the long press of the user and the vibration feedback of Taptic Engine, 3D touch interaction can be realized.
Therefore, after being able to realize an experience similar to 3D touch through software, Apple naturally embraced change happily by cutting 3D touch to reduce costs.
The software adaptation of 3.3D touch is still primary.
The previous idea for 3D touch was to innovate the game experience by adding vertical operation. But unfortunately, the adaptation of the game to 3D touch is still in its infancy. In other words, it is still dispensable, and the game adaptation for 3D touch also increases the development difficulty and cost, so when developers realize the functions of 3D touch, they still only realize the adaptation in the previous recompression scene.
Originally, the interaction between "Peek light pressure" and "Pop heavy pressure" could have more room for expansion, but because developers didn't participate more, it didn't bring more choices to the interaction as Apple imagined.
4. Consumers do not use it frequently.
The most fatal point is that a large number of consumers rarely use 3D touch. From the release of iPhone 6s series by Apple to 20 18, consumers know little about 3D touch, and even many consumers don't know the existence of 3D touch. Therefore, when searching for 3D touch in search engines, substitutes almost always ask what 3D touch is. So this is also the last straw that may bend the camel.
Phil, senior vice president of Apple's global marketing business? Phil schiller once commented on 3D touch: "As far as engineering is concerned, it is beyond imagination to create hardware supporting 3D Touch function. If we can't develop the products that users really want to use, we will waste one or two years, resulting in huge losses in manufacturing costs and investment. If it is just a demonstration function and no one uses it after one month, then this is a huge waste of engineering talents. "
Therefore, if 3D touch is in a state of low utilization for a long time, the cancellation of 3D touch is doomed.
In the non-full screen iPhone, it used to be a very practical function for 3D touch to switch out the background. It's really a pity that such a practical function has been cancelled. Although Apple tries its best to reduce the impact of canceling 3D touch at the interactive level, the old models that support 3D touch still have the problem of interactive logic redundancy after updating iOS 13, which is very unpalatable.