The iPhone Home button made me feel safe, but it’s time to move on

This may be shocking to hear from someone who would later edit a magazine called iPad and iPhone User, but I was the last of my friends to get a mobile phone. In the end, I only agreed to buy one because I lost a bet.

Partly this can be explained by stubbornness, but another factor was that smartphones arrived slightly too late for me. By the time they took off in the U.K., I was a prematurely middle-aged 20-something, already beginning to lose the fearlessness you see when kids pick up touchscreen devices for the first time, which I had when 16-bit game consoles arrived a decade earlier. Children play with tech happily and recklessly, but I was worried I’d buy the wrong model, or use it wrong and break it. I was just a bit scared to commit.

And I wasn’t alone. It happened early for me, but most of us, at some point, start to find new technology intimidating. We’ve all seen older relatives jabbing nervously at touchscreens in expectation of disaster, bamboozled by tiny keyboards, or refusing to stray outside the two or three drop-down menus they know are a safe way to access email or the internet. Technology is not a fun experience when it makes you feel uncomfortable or unsafe.

Apple’s great success was to understand this fear and find a way to soothe it. We talk about the intuitive design of the iPhone and the iPad, the way things do what you expect and the processes are simple and easy to understand. But these are welcoming devices in ways that go well beyond the software interface. Apple’s engineers worked hard to make the first iPhones and iPad something you would want to pick up, a reassuring object that invited interaction, not awe. And while the creed of control minimalism would later risk turning into a mania, at heart it was about having a small number of buttons so you could easily tell which one did what.

The most important element of all was the Home button, perfectly sized and shaped for your thumb and nestled at the bottom of the display. Wherever you were, whatever you were doing, you had only to press the Home button and you’d be whisked back to the safety and familiarity of the Home screen. This was the press-in-case-of-emergency button for early iPhone and iPad owners, the safety belt, the parachute, and the get-out-of-jail-free card. It was Don Draper’s carousel. It was Dorothy’s ruby slippers, clicked together three times. There really was no place like Home.

I don’t think it’s possible to overstate the importance of the Home button in the early success of the iPhone and iPad. Tech heads, early adopters, and the wealthy young were always ripe to be recruited when the smartphone revolution began, but the intuitive friendliness of Apple’s devices enabled them to access the markets beyond—older users, busy or stressed users, users with disabilities, inexperienced and nervous users who never would have thought technology was for them. People, in other words, like me.

It’s been 18 years since the first Home button arrived with the first iPhone, but the time has come to say goodbye. Apple’s been working on the transition for nearly half of that time, since 2017’s iPhone X heralded a future based around Face ID and full-body screens, and it finally ended an era last week with the launch of the iPhone 16e and the discontinuation of the final iPhone SE. There are now, for the first time since 2007, zero products in the Apple Store with a Home button. We’re going to have to learn to live without it.

And I think that’s okay. The Home button was important, but it brought problems of its own. For one thing, it took up precious room on the front of your device; I’d have trouble now swapping my iPhone 16 Plus for a screen the size of the SE’s. And it used to go wrong a lot. When I started at Macworld we had an article explaining what to do if your Home button stopped working and it regularly used to get more traffic than anything else.

More importantly, I think society is ready to move on. These days far fewer people, I suspect, would describe themselves as total beginners when it comes to technology. My parents’ generation all have smartphones and most of them seem to own a tablet too; they’re comfortable with the gestures used to operate a touchscreen device. And some guy who used to be terrified of owning a mobile phone now writes about them for a living. We’re ready to manage without the crutch of a Home button, and a lot of the credit for that goes to Apple.

Foundry

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.

Trending: Top stories

iPhone 16e: The ‘e’ means everything.

Or, as a counterpoint: the iPhone 16e is disappointing, and it’s all Apple Intelligence’s fault.

$699?! Why I can’t recommend the iPhone 15 to a single type of customer.

Apple’s political turn is leading it down a sketchy road.

Deciding when to buy a Mac is about to get a lot easier.

Could Apple take on Nvidia with a standalone graphics card?

Someone hacked a Windows Phone to ‘run’ iOS.

Podcast of the week

There’s a new iPhone in town! Apple has released the iPhone 16e and we have all the details on the latest 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

• Hades 2 review: Now with native support for M-series Macs.
• Creative Aurvana Ace Mimi review: Good sound, many weaknesses.
• Logitech MX Creative Console review: Dream toolkit for creatives.
• Alogic Edge 34″ and 40″ Ultrawide QHD Monitor review: One monitor to match two.
• Got Bag Pro Pack review: Sustainability meets functionality.

Software updates, bugs, and problems

Get ready to be annoyed: Apple wants to put ads in Maps.

No Camera Control? No problem, your iPhone 15 Pro will soon get Visual Intelligence.

iOS 18.4 set for ‘early April’ release after a lengthy beta delay.

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, including our new email from The Macalope–an irreverent, humorous take on the latest news and rumors from a half-man, half-mythical Mac beast. You can also follow us on Facebook, Threads, Bluesky, or X for discussion of breaking Apple news stories. See you next Monday, and stay Appley.