Bloomberg Says 2017 iPhone Will Ditch the Home Button

You’ve probably heard the rumors that this year’s iPhone is probably not going to be the most exciting update. The iPhone 7 might get a faster processor and some other doo-dahs, but it’s the 2017 iPhone that should really be grabbing your attention. Next year’s iPhone will reportedly undergo a significant overhaul and one of those changes will be the removal of the physical home button.

We’ve heard this rumor before, but now it’s coming from a much more reputable source. Bloomberg makes mention of “removing the Home button, according to a person familiar with the matter.” This is buried in a story that covers how Apple wants to use tap-to-pay on subways in Japan by leveraging Sony’s FeliCa technology. That’s cool and all, but the removal of the home button will have much far-reaching ramifications.

Without the home button, how will you ask Siri a question on the 2017 iPhone? Without the home button, how will you use Apple Pay? Without the home button, how will you, well, go “home” on the 2017 iPhone? Realistically, it’s more likely that Apple is replacing the physical home button with a virtual one, not unlike what we see on numerous Android phones. They could go with soft touch buttons or, more likely, the virtual home button could get integrated into the screen itself.

But the functionality needs to go beyond simply acting like a button, since it still needs to read your fingerprint for Touch ID. There’s talk that Apple wants to embed that tech into a curved OLED screen for the 2017 iPhone, making for a smaller footprint and a larger display. Since they’re already getting rid of the headphone jack, they might as well get rid of other physical things too. Are the volume buttons next to go?

Via Gizmodo