If I'm remembering correctly the main difference is that it was fast -- the space bar cursor is fine but I do feel like I lost something that made my input on mobile better.
Before: I'm typing quickly, and I want to move cursor, I press slightly harder.
Now: I'm typing quickly, and I want to move the cursor, I press and wait.
iOS17 has a "faster" haptic touch setting and it helps, but with 3d touch I was much faster.
Thanks for the hint on swiping the spacebar. I still miss the ability to move the cursor vertically and select with the trackpad but this at least makes Gboard usable for me.
I think I had the same false-negative problem you are describing with 3D touch trackpad, but it seemed to get a lot better for me with the iOS 9.3 release. Maybe I'm imagining it, but it seemed like there were improvements to whatever algorithm determines a user's intention for normal vs 3D touch.
On the other hand, maybe I trained myself to their algorithm. It seems like starting with light contact and increasing pressure is a more reliable trigger than just going in with firm pressure right away.
The whole point is that, it enables a whole new type of interaction, that is: press to get into cursor mode -> hover over a word -> press again to select it. This is simply impossible without 3d Touch.
The fact that I've see this exchange many times ("But cant you long press to get a cursor?" / "Yes but 3d touch is faster"), even from people defending it, is so fun to me because it means the technology really was misunderstood, and explains a lot about why Apple killed it...
I miss 3D Touch on the iPhone every day because of how good it was for manipulating the cursor.
Without it you can hold on the space bar to enter a trackpad-type mode, but this is a poor substitute.
With 3D Touch, you could press a little harder than normal anywhere on the keyboard to enter the trackpad mode, but then you could press hard again to switch to word selection mode, which functioned much like a click-and-drag on a trackpad.
Very difficult to describe and admittedly very unintuitive, but once you got the muscle memory down it was so efficient.
I loathe the fact that everything that 3D Touch used to do has been replaced by a long press. Everything feels so sluggish now.
The second levels are pretty similar - push harder than you would normally, pushing "through" your usual action, get haptic feedback, something else happens. One difference that helps discoverability, though, is that 3D touch for stuff like app shortcuts and "live photo" replays has UI-based feedback to tell you there's more if you push harder, whereas the second level push on the MacBook trackpad feels less rewarding to experiment with (or maybe that's just a function of it being used far less in OS X than in iOS).
Force Touch is something supported by 2015+ MacBook trackpads (you can push harder to effectively middle-click something) and 3D Touch was the iPhone screen tech that did the same thing, which has been replaced with Haptic Touch (equivalent to Android's "long press").
Personally i don't have this experience. I find 3d touch way faster than a press and hold. I use it all the time to open links in new tabs in safari, its basically a right click. Instead of "tap, wait a second, open in background" its "press in and swipe up, open in background"
Although the functionality is mostly the same, it feels so much faster to me.
I'm an android guy, but force touch moving cursor on iOS works very fine. Better than spacebar sliding. Just press harder on on keyboard and it'll hide keys and let you desk the cursor around, mouse style.
The long touch cursor movement is different than the 3d touch cursor movement.
With a long touch, it brings up a loupe that magnifies the text. With 3d touch it lets you use the keyboard almost as a trackpad to move the cursor around.
> I can’t push anywhere on the keyboard anymore to activate it. I now have to move all the way to the spacebar to activate it.
"All the way" is just moving the finger a couple of cm. The main difference is that 3d touch instantly activated the touchpad, now there is a small delay of 0.25s. Not a bad compromise if it means removing some hardware.
I used 3D Touch all the time for one specific feature: if you did a 3D Touch on the keyboard it would turn into a touch pad for moving the cursor around a block of text.
For anyone else who was devastated to lose this feature, I was happy to learn it’s still there! Now you do a long tap on the space bar to activate it.
I think 3d touch has problems but they are all tied to software. I find it extremely useful for keyboard cursor. It requires some finesse but the 3d touch version (as opposed to the long press available on iPad and iPhone XR) is more useful as it can do selection by changing pressure. It is not very accessible as it requires some finesse though.
Another feature I use all the time is 3d touch on apps which have quick shortcuts.
Where I agree is that there is too much of a fine line drawn between long press, drag and 3d touch and it is far from easy to be able to activate the desired one 100% of the time.
And 3D Touch on the virtual keyboard, which used to turn it into a trackpad with which you could move the text cursor freely and 3D Touch again to select text has been replaced with "Haptic Touch" which lets you long-touch the space bar to move the cursor but offers no way to select text so you have to revert to the old "touch the word you want to edit" UI.
I found the 3D touch on the keyboard to be flakey compared to the spacebar -- if you moved your finger before 3D touch activated, then it lost context and wouldn't activate 3D touch, and then you'd have to delete the stupid 'j' that just got dropped in your email.
My wife had the same problem. I knew how to do it because the tips app showed me after I upgraded. Not sure if it didn’t show the same thing to everyone.
I think it works fine although I still generally prefer the haptic/long touch spacebar method.
I always had trouble with selection vs placing the cursor, and it irritated me to no end. The long touch spacebar works great though and I still prefer it.
If you aren’t familiar with the long touch spacebar, give it a try. It temporarily changes the keyboard to a touchpad for moving the cursor. It’s great.
That’d be really cool to have, especially on a haptic keyboard! Unfortunately Apple seems averse to the idea of haptic feedback on a keyboard.
On a similar note, I’ve been disappointed in the removal of 3D Touch. I understand that it adds complexity to the display layer, but replacing 3D Touch with long-presses doesn’t really cut it for me
Before: I'm typing quickly, and I want to move cursor, I press slightly harder.
Now: I'm typing quickly, and I want to move the cursor, I press and wait.
iOS17 has a "faster" haptic touch setting and it helps, but with 3d touch I was much faster.
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