Why the iPhone Needs 3D Touch

​I’ve been noodling for a while how to articulate the importance of Apple’s 3D touch and made a weak plea earlier for Apple to not water it down. I still believe that equating 3D Touch with a long press would be a big mistake and selling touch language short. 

But it took all the talk about the next MacBook Pro having an LED screen for the function row to finally crystallize for me why the iPhone needs 3D Touch. I love function keys. 

Anyone in corporate America using big software packages like SAP or Oracle makes use of the function keys on a daily basis. These keys are like cheat codes in a video game that allow you to bypass whatever interface you’re in to immediately perform some kind of task or go to some other screen. Anyone worth their salt will quickly memorize these function shortcuts and employ them whenever possible to make their work more efficient. They’re awesome and I can’t get enough of them. 

It occurred to me that the long-press and 3D Touch are the equivalent of function keys on a laptop. They're shortcuts that you learn and don’t have to see on the screen. I still remember how tickled I was when I first learned how doing a long-press on an app made everything wiggle and I had entered a portal into another interface. Then came 3D Touch with shortcuts to just about everything.  

The long-press and 3D Touch are F1 and F2. Apple doesn’t need to combine the two functions to just a single F1 key. They need to do the opposite and think of how to create an F3 and F4. It’s doubtful that iOS would need 24 functions like a desktop keyboard, but three or four might be nice. Especially if you’re trying to use your corporate software system on your iPad or iPhone. You don’t get function keys in the iOS keyboard. 

In today’s world, using function keys on your iPad onscreen keyboard is excruciating and almost unworkable. There are no function keys on the standard keyboard and tabbing to one keyboard for functions and another for letters is downright painful. 

This is yet another reason that Apple needs to bring 3D Touch to the iPad. This would give software developers the equivalent of a function key via touch. If the next iPad allowed me to have an F1 and F2 function via long-press and 3D Touch, I’d plunk $1000 on the counter in a heartbeat. Anything to stop from having to switch back an forth between keyboards. That would be bigger for corporate users than the Apple Pencil.

robert@perezonomics.com