My wife got me my first iPhone around 2013 I believe ( old iPhone 4 classic ).
At the time I had very mixed feelings as I really hated Apple's walled garden OS, lack of MicroSD slots, lack of replaceable battery,
and proprietary charging \ data transfer port.
That said I was still a little jealous of my old co-worker who had the first iPhone and showed off the wonders of the Lightsaber App and reading websites with pinch zoom so it was cool to finally have these capabilities on my own device.
Since I am ostensibly a hermit and do not really "consume" digital goods like paid apps and music, I jailbroke the phone not long after owning it and gleefully installed a number of janky retro emulators on it.
I kept that phone for a LOONG time. I believe it was about 1.5yrs ago when my phone provider was acquired \ merged and the new owners mandated that I could no longer use my ancient beast on their new network.
My wife ( who is now thoroughly entrenched in the iPhone world ) insisted I get a newer iPhone as a replacement so I got a slightly aged iPhone 11 due to the supply shortages.
At first I was thrilled at the increases in storage and processing power but then using phone began to sour my mood.
They removed the headphone jack in iPhone 8 (?) I believe so obviously this was strike one against the device.
I think the home button was removed in iPhone 10 so "strike two". Then the charging cable does not connect to a standard USB port on a PC
or standard USB charger so I could no longer sync iTunes over a cable without buying some specialized adapter cable. Third strike.
Since the whole world followed Apple's lead and no other phones offered these features either I was consigned to fume about the supposed "progress" of my new device.
Flash Forward to 2023 and the iPhone 15 Pro launch and now we can see that they are removing the "Easy silent mode toggle switch"
and are replacing it with a haptic multi-function button. Garbage.
The point of having a silent toggle is that you can quickly silence your phone even if it's dark or in your pocket. Now you need to look at your phone to see that you actually succeeded in silencing it. How can they possibly think this was an improvement?
I really am stumped here. Did someone at Apple think that forcing you to look at your phone to silence it will give advertisers more time to show you advertisements on lock-screen news-feed? Are the trying to make going to the movies more inconvenient so that you will stay home and watch Apple TV+ instead? Did the US Government tell Apple to change this so that law enforcement or intelligence agencies and explicitly tell when you are silencing your phone so that no clandestine recordings can be captured without an easily spotted visual of someone struggling to silence their phone? Is this just more "reduce the number of buttons" Apple insanity?
It really boggles the mind.
When they got rid of the Home Button, they seriously damaged the product brand in my opinion. The whole point of having a Home Button is that if you are stuck in some misbehaving App or Website and you need to get back to the starting GUI you can press a button to get safely home. Now if the bottom swipe is obscured by a misbehaving App your only choice is to power off the phone.
The excuse for the removal of the Home Button as that it made the phone less water resilient. In that case, how did the buttons on the side of the phone continue to persist? If there is some absurd logic that can be put forth about why side buttons are more water resilient than a front button, then why not move the Home Button to the side?
So I went around looking for iPhone 15 critique videos and to my utter dismay nobody was complaining about the removal of the Silence Toggle switch. Instead they bemoan that the iPhone 15 is "more of the same" even though the CPU, GPU, RAM, and Storage are all significantly upgraded.
The common complaint is that Apple hasn't improved the physical aspects of the phone such as not having a folding or flip phone design.
I find that to be a completely crazy take on things. The classic buttons worked fine. The form factor did not need to be substantially changed. The underlying CPU and GPU is where you should expect to see improvements for products like these.
Beyond bringing back the Home Button and Headphone Jack ( and preventing the full removal of the Silent Mode toggle ), the only "form factor" change I would like to see is some sort of accessory that approximates a slider era cellphone keyboard so I can type out texts or phone numbers with real keys as feedback.
Nakey Jakey sorta touched on a few of these issues in one of his newer videos: