"It's got to be about the worst cost to utilization ration of any feature on the iPhone."
I can't speak to whether you're correct or not, but that feature is a massive time saver for me. It's one of the most compelling features that keeps me on their platform. I have large fingers and selecting text with 3D touch is incredibly easy compared to using the twin cursors offered by iOS/Android for that purpose.
I run into quite a number of folks who have no idea they have 3D touch though. Surprises them even more than me when I show them.
I don't use 3D touch for much else though, which sort of supports your assertion.
I use 3D Touch on the daily to move the cursor around when typing on my XS Max. Definitely a feature I will miss when I get a new iPhone and it will take some time to get use to
Fully agree to that! It's the best cursor movement solution that currently exists on phones.
Since someone mentioned that iOS12 now includes a solution that works without 3D touch by long-pressing spacebar I tried that too: It's not really a replacement. Since you start touching at the lowest-end of the screen scrolling upwards is awkward. It feels less precise than the 3d touch variant, and selecting works requires another hand to tip the screen.
Going from my iPhone 8 to an Xr seems like a step back to me in this regard. And I'm not willing to invest in the Xs.
I've had a 7 since launch and only now from your comment learned about the text selection feature. What a perfect illustration of the discoveribility issue of 3D Touch.
I’m a firm believer that this is a failure of educating the user rather than the feature itself. With my next iPhone I will be forced to touch and hold, causing me delays which I hate. In hindsight, it might’ve worked to have the 3D Touch features available by 3D Touch and long press, causing users to stumble upon it by accident. I just wrote this reply on my phone and had to shake to undo, prompting a hint that I could achieve the same thing by double tapping with three fingers. Something like this would’ve worked for 3D Touch I’m sure. Imagine how loaded desktop UIs would be without right click context menus. This is what 3D Touch could’ve solved for touch UIs. Now where back to UIs that are either dumbed down or crowded. Or we have long press delays, punishing power users.
An interesting fact is that it's actually a Post 3D touch feature. It should have been possible to do it all the years. But the feature only had been introduced with iOS 12, after the first phone without 3d touch (iPhone Xr) after some years had been released.
I would have been useful for devices like the iPhone SE too.
Apple had a solid solution with 3d touch -- press a little bit harder and it was near instant jump to right position/highlight. I felt much faster inputting on my iPhone then. I miss it every day.
> I was happy to learn it’s still there! Now you do a long tap on the space bar to activate it.
It's not though. The feature implemented with haptic touch only lets you long press on space bar and move the cursor. You have to use a second finger to start selection and control the bounds, and it's far less accurate.
With 3D touch, you could press down once to start cursor mode, again to start selection, and again to stop. You could also reset the selection while staying in cursor mode. I was able to, quite frequently, change entire sentences and edit text really efficiently with a single hand holding the phone. That's impossible now.
I'd be really happy if Apple went back and improved the spacebar cursor system, but right now it's objectively worse as it requires two fingers rather than one to select text.
FWIW, I recall being shown some of these new gestures (cut and paste, undo) in post-update iOS 13 splash screen of some kind.
By contrast, when I hardware swapped from XS to 11, nothing prepared me for the loss of formerly oh-so-intuitive 3D Touch. I’d read about it, didn’t realize how second nature it had become. I often saw others struggle with or unaware of 3D Touch, so my guess is Apple metrics showed it wasn’t as widely used as they’d hoped. The other positive is consistency, as I occasionally attempted 3D Touch on iPad or old phones and felt stymied.
That's not the full story. From iOS 12 you can do the long touch on the spacebar and get the same functionality as the 3d touch on the rest of the keyboard.
Great for me as 3d touch is so flaky on my iPhone since I got the screen replaced.
Tried it on my iPhone 8 (by disabling 3d touch). It seems to be a lot less precise for whatever reason. And one issue is also that the swipe always starts at the lowest end of the screen and it's not easily possible to scroll downwards with it, since one starts at the spacebar which is at the very bottom of the screen. With 3d touch one starts the gesture somewhere in the middle of the keyboard, which provides room in every direction.
I tried it on my old iPhone 8. But it doesn't work that great there, since the spacebar is at the very bottom of the square screen, and therefore there is no further space for scrolling down from there.
On my new iPhone XR it's far more convenient to use, since the spacebar is not at the bottom, and scrolling down (e.g. in order to edit a message) works more reliable.
It still doesn't feel as good as 3d touch on the old thing, e.g. it sometimes doesn't go into touchpad mode when pressed directly after a word and doesn't feel as precise. But it's good enough that I don't terrible miss it.
I thought it was a bit of a gimmick in iOS 9 but since they went all in for iOS 10. It's almost like right clicking on a phone. Just wish more third party apps used it.
I can't speak to whether you're correct or not, but that feature is a massive time saver for me. It's one of the most compelling features that keeps me on their platform. I have large fingers and selecting text with 3D touch is incredibly easy compared to using the twin cursors offered by iOS/Android for that purpose.
I run into quite a number of folks who have no idea they have 3D touch though. Surprises them even more than me when I show them.
I don't use 3D touch for much else though, which sort of supports your assertion.
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