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On Losing 3D Touch

Posted by Matt Birchler
— 1 min read

From John Gruber's iPhone 11 review:

There’s also a shortcut that not many people know about, but when you show it to them, their minds are blown: with 3D Touch iPhones, you can 3D Touch and hold anywhere on the keyboard (that is to say, keep your thumb or finger pressed on the keyboard) and the keyboard turns into a virtual trackpad for moving the insertion point around any text editing field, exactly like moving a mouse pointer. With non-3D Touch devices (including iPads), you can still do this, but you can’t press anywhere on the keyboard to initiate it — you have to press-and-hold on the spacebar.

I am not looking forward to losing 3D Touch for this feature alone. This feature has been revelatory for me over the past few years since it was rolled out. It singlehandedly makes the iOS keyboard leagues better than any keyboard I've used on any other phone.

Yes, I have used the modified version on the iPhone XR, and it's simply not as good. I hope that using it everyday will make it click more with me, but I'm sad that not enough people knew about this feature.