Welcome to our weekly Apple Breakfast column, which includes all the Apple news you missed last week in a handy bite-sized roundup. We call it Apple Breakfast because we think it goes great with a Monday morning cup of coffee or tea, but it’s cool if you want to give it a read during lunch or dinner hours too.
Call to Action
The people reading this column can presumably be divided into two groups: those who bought a new iPhone on Friday, and those who are feeling sorry for themselves. You can debate the value of the upgrades in this year’s handsets, but Apple has an unrivaled ability to generate a fear of missing out.
One upgrade I’m particularly keen on debating, nonetheless, is the Action button on the 15 Pro. Time will tell if this new hardware element proves popular, but based on my experience with the Apple Watch Ultra, I’m skeptical, to say the least. The potential for customization is appealing, and the button’s capabilities may grow in the future as Apple (and, assuming Apple is amenable to the idea, third parties) come up with interesting functions that can be tied to it. But I reckon that by Christmas most 15 Pro owners will have settled on a single mundane use for the button, or have stopped using it entirely.
Granted, early reviews are overwhelmingly positive. As mentioned in our iPhone 15 Pro review roundup, the Action button has been called “a really great quality of life improvement” that could be “workflow-changing.” And social media was already buzzing this weekend with people sharing clever uses for the Action button via the Shortcuts command.
But I remember the similarly optimistic reception for previous hardware upgrades on Apple products that went on to gather dust, and I doubt that even a very thorough pre-launch review or exorbitant early adopters can truly evaluate the long-term prospects of a feature that needs to grow into the user’s daily habits.
I speak here from bitter experience, having reviewed the first-gen Apple Watch Ultra last year. In that article I said the Action button was “a ‘nice to have,’ not a ‘must have’ feature,” but expressed some optimism about the future. “Now that the hardware is in place Apple can brainstorm different functions that users can bind to the button,” I observed, adding my suspicion that “once we’re used to this new design it will prove to be only positive.”
Needless to say, I barely used the Action button once the honeymoon period was over (indeed a few months after posting my review I switched back to the Series 9 and didn’t miss that extra button), and nothing I’ve heard about the second-gen Ultra makes me think it has become essential.
Regular readers, indeed, might feel like I should have known better, having also reviewed the first Touch Bar-equipped MacBook Pro back in 2016. In a similar fashion, I expressed reservations about the Touch Bar in the short term but predicted that user habit and developer buy-in could make it a vital part of the user’s repertoire in the future. In fact, it was probably doomed from the start for quite elementary ergonomic reasons.
The iPhone 15 Pro’s Action button, like the Action button on the Apple Watch Ultra, does not have the same physical shortcomings as the Touch Bar: it offers physical feedback so you can use it blind, and occupies the same place as a previous control. It certainly has a better chance of success than the poor Touch Bar. But that isn’t saying much, and I still don’t fancy its chances. The fundamental problem is that smartphones have been around for more than a decade and a half and we all know how to use them. The control mechanisms are so ingrained by now that any genuinely different approach has to be transformatively more efficient in order to overcome the inertia of long-term habit and muscle memory, and I can’t see how “an extra button that can do roughly nine things, and you have to decide in advance which one” fits that description. The smartphone paradigm is all about context sensitivity, not one function tied to one control. It all just feels inefficient, wasteful, unApple.
Then again, it’s worth pointing out that I haven’t tried any of the new iPhones yet, so all of this skepticism is purely speculative. And it’s possible, given my current place in the deprived second wave of reviewers, that my pessimism is motivated entirely by envy.
Foundry
Trending: Top stories
Sorry, this iPhone is doomed because the next iPhone will be better.
The iPhone 15 Pro Max is the best phone ever. Yawn.
Dan Moren lists 3 new Apple features he would literally be lost without.
Apple’s new $19 EarPods are a smarter purchase than the $549 AirPods Max.
WhatsApp is coming to the iPad at last!
If you break your new iPhone 15 Pro, it’ll be a lot cheaper to fix it now.
Jason Cross explains how the iPhone 15’s new battery features will help your phone last longer.
Podcast of the week
Apple backed up the truck and dropped a whole bunch of operating systems on us! iOS 17, iPadOS 17, watchOS 10, and even tvOS 17! They’re all here and we talk about them in this episode of the Macworld Podcast!
You can catch every episode of the Macworld Podcast on Spotify, Soundcloud, the Podcasts app, or our own site.
Reviews corner
And with that, we’re done for this week’s Apple Breakfast. If you’d like to get regular roundups, sign up for our newsletters. You can also follow us on Facebook, Threads, or Twitter for discussion of breaking Apple news stories. See you next Monday, and stay Appley.