Analyst Ming-Chi Kuo has dashed everyone’s hopes with a new Medium blog post; due to “design issues”, the iPhone 15 Pro will no longer be featuring solid-state buttons in place of the usual volume buttons and mute switch… R.I.P.
Kuo’s Medium post lays it all out:
My latest survey indicates that due to unresolved technical issues before mass production, both high-end iPhone 15 Pro models (Pro & Pro Max) will abandon the closely-watched solid-state button design and revert to the traditional physical button design.
Ming-Chi Kuo
This definitely sucks. Reports have been coming in for months regarding the purported iPhone 15 Pro’s new solid-state buttons that would feature additional Taptic engines. In fact, it was only a handful of weeks ago we learned from trusted leaks that one of the major changes to iPhone 15 Pro would be the removal of the mute switch to be updated to a user-programmable “action button”.
Kuo goes on to say that he doesn’t believe this design change will impact mass production, or any shipment schedules for iPhone 15 Pro:
Based on these factors, removing solid-state buttons should have a limited impact on the mass production schedule and shipments for Pro models.
Ming-Chi Kuo
Kuo’s reasoning for the lack of delays to Apple’s overall schedule is that the iPhone 15 Pro is currently still in the EVT development stage – which means there’s still ample time to modify the design of the device. Of course, removing a potentially difficult design element like solid-state buttons would also simplify the design process and potentially speed everything up.
Well then, if iPhone 15 Pro doesn’t get new, fancy, fake buttons then the feature will undoubtedly be pushed to iPhone 16 Pro – or perhaps iPhone Ultra.
Classic Apple move, huh? Killing a super cool feature because it isn’t 1000% ready to go – but we could still see the Reality Pro headset at WWDC in June… which is reportedly not ready to see the light of day AT ALL.
