Apple had a solid solution with 3d touch -- press a little bit harder and it was near instant jump to right position/highlight. I felt much faster inputting on my iPhone then. I miss it every day.
> Haptic Touch is a feature on the iPhone XR (but not the iPhone XS) and later iPhone models replacing 3D Touch. The touchscreen, which no longer has a pressure sensitive layer, distinguishes between a tap and a long-press using a timed delay to activate certain 3D Touch features (only ones for elements that do not have an action assigned to long press). This feature was added to the iPhone SE (1st generation) with the iOS 13 update and to any iPad capable of running iPadOS 13. As of watchOS 7, only Haptic Touch is recognized, and Force Touch is discontinued on all subsequent Apple Watches.
The whole point is that, it enables a whole new type of interaction, that is: press to get into cursor mode -> hover over a word -> press again to select it. This is simply impossible without 3d Touch.
The fact that I've see this exchange many times ("But cant you long press to get a cursor?" / "Yes but 3d touch is faster"), even from people defending it, is so fun to me because it means the technology really was misunderstood, and explains a lot about why Apple killed it...
If I'm remembering correctly the main difference is that it was fast -- the space bar cursor is fine but I do feel like I lost something that made my input on mobile better.
Before: I'm typing quickly, and I want to move cursor, I press slightly harder.
Now: I'm typing quickly, and I want to move the cursor, I press and wait.
iOS17 has a "faster" haptic touch setting and it helps, but with 3d touch I was much faster.
When in an input field, you simply tap to place the cursor. If you need finer placement you use the spacebar. The tap works 90% of the time since you’re usually editing whole words.
Also, iOS has kept a software implementation of force touch around, even after removing the hardware: a hard press goes directly into cursor placement, it takes a bit more force than it used to. I imagine it’s a mix of gyroscopes and detecting a growing touch surface.
Yes. It’s a long press, though, not 3D Touch or whatever they used to call it. Admittedly this got much better with the new shorter delay to activate long press in iOS 17.
It’s restricted to the space bar, too. IIRC it was much better on my old 6S.
3D Touch capable models (6s to x) had actual pressure sensors embedded in the screen assembly, which meant there was another input channel (how hard you pressed) that apple mapped to an extra commands, like a right click. To highlight text with it, you could press slightly harder anywhere on the keyboard and that would start cursor movement mode (like holding on the spacebar on newer models), then, with the cursor on the word you wanted to start highlighting from, you pressed a bit harder and it would highlight from that word on until you released the keyboard.
