[samwillis]

I'm not sure a touch sensitive button is a lower cost component than a physical button, you need an IC to drive a touch button. I can't see this being driven by cost savings.

I'm not even convinced there would be a cost saving when you take into account buttons failing and needing to be replaced.

Reducing the number of buttons and replacing them with on screen-only (say move to on screen-only volume) would be a clear cost saving. But also a massive UX disaster that they wouldn't do.

[bsder]

Removing anything "mechanical" is a huge cost saver and a massive reliability improver.

Those buttons require special drilling and machining steps on the case. Removing those speeds up the production of cases by a lot which equals cost.

Mechanical switches are way more expensive than huge areas of silicon chip. It's not even close.

Finally, solid-state touch sensitive stuff effectively never fails. It never gets dirty. It never wears out.

Does it have Heisenbugs and screwball failure modes? Oh, yeah. I imagine triggering them with gloves on will be a nightmare, for example.

But, it's okay, people will wear special Apple gloves in order to use the advanced feature of their new phone. When something on an iPhone fails, it's obviously always the fault of the end user, no?

[samwillis]

I'm still not convinced, back when I worked in product development (I was a product design engineer) edge mounted micro switches designed for this use case were dirt cheep, rated to IP 6x (no dust ingress) and hundreds of thousands of presses.

There would still be side operations during machining of the case to make the raised profile (I assume there still will be one you can feel). And if anything that means more waste material. That or they still have an insert.

Maybe at Apple scale they can be similar in cost, but I don't believe there is a significant cost saving at all.