It looks like one of the biggest design changes in this year’s iPhone refresh has been undone. In a post today on Medium, respected analyst Ming-Chi Kuo said that Apple no longer plans to use a solid-state button design on the iPhone 15 Pro and 15 Pro Max.
“My latest investigation indicates that due to unresolved technical issues prior to mass production, the two high-end iPhone 15 Pro models (Pro and Pro Max) will abandon the closely watched solid-state button design,” he writes, “and will return to the traditional physical button design.
As early as October 2022, rumors indicated that Pro versions of late 2023 iPhones had solid-state power and volume buttons, and the theory was widely accepted as fact until this spring. (We discussed their likely implications in a cost-benefit analysis last month, for example.) Indeed, it was Kuo himself who originally spread the rumor, but with the inclusion of the classic word of warning “can”.
In other words, the buttons would not physically press inward, but rather use a haptic mechanism to mimic the feeling of a click in response to pressure and skin contact. This approach appears to be difficult to execute.
Apple did something similar back in 2016, when the iPhone 7 launched with a solid-state home button. The idea was that dropping a moving part reduced the likelihood of mechanical problems: in previous iterations, the Home button had been one of the most failure-prone parts of the iPhone. But the new design wasn’t universally loved either; we called it “weird” and “weird” at the time, and its inability to work with non-capacitive gloves was an issue with the iPhone SE.
Also, using a static design on the Power button, in particular, is more difficult than the Home button. Such designs need power; If you’ve turned off one of Apple’s recent MacBooks, for example, trying to press down on the solid-state trackpad is like pressing down on a flat, unresponsive aluminum slab. Still, the power button obviously needs to be able to do its job when the iPhone is turned off.
It’s unclear if this is the “unresolved technical issue” or if the rumor was extinguished to begin with; the cynic might observe that it’s rather convenient for Kuo to be able to grab the headlines twice, first by starting a rumor and then by killing it. But Kuo is generally knowledgeable, and as he notes in the Medium post, there’s still time for Apple to change its mind.
“The iPhone 15 Pro is currently in the EVT [Engineering Validation Test] development stage,” he wrote, “so there is still time to change the design.”
For the latest news and rumors leading up to launch this fall, check out our regularly updated iPhone 15 Superguide, which includes comprehensive information on the Pro models, or you can check out our iPhone 15 Ultra rumor roundup. If you don’t want (or can’t) wait that long, find the best current model for your needs with our iPhone buying guide.
