For years, capacitive buttons were present on smartphones after pushing physical buttons away from front panels, long before they themselves were essentially killed off by edge-to-edge screens, even on lower-end phones.
Now, it looks like the buttons on the sides of smartphones are next. For a long time, the iPhone 15 has been rumored to completely ditch the mechanical buttons and go fully capacitive instead. However, in the end, this was apparently not the case Due to “unresolved technical issues”.
That doesn’t mean Apple has completely given up on the idea. A new supply chain report from the Chinese publication The economic news claimsas Spotted by AppleInsiderthat the transition may happen as early as this year with the expected arrival of the iPhone 16 family of smartphones.
Economic Daily News reported that Advanced Semiconductor Engineering (ASE) has secured a huge contract to supply Apple with a system-in-package (SIP) module for capacitive side buttons. This capacitive solution – one module per side – will be supported by two separate Taptic Engines to provide haptic feedback.
The upcoming iPhone 16 is rumored to ditch the physical buttons shortly after the launch of the current iPhone 15 family, although we haven’t heard about the plans yet this year.
ASE expects hundreds of millions of shipments due to expected demand for the new generation of iPhones. However, this is where the report starts to become less credible. According to the report, those shipments are expected to ramp up in the third quarter of 2024, which sounds pretty late for the iPhone 16’s on-time integration and shipments.
As AppleInsider pointed out, Economic Daily News is a reliable source of information about Chinese suppliers. However, their predictions for US customer companies are less accurate. Therefore, it’s entirely possible that all of the iPhone 16’s buttons — including the voice capture button — will remain mechanical.
However, the chance that future iPhones will actually ditch mechanical buttons is now much higher.