Older iPhones had a screen that could interpret the pressure of your touch, giving the ui the ability to do multiple things based on how hard you press.
The best feature was pressing hard into the keyboard to get a cursor and then pressing lightly again to highlight text, all with just one thumb. It was super good. There’s an alternative to that now, but it pales in comparison.
I liked 3D Touch, but I’m really glad we moved on from a physical home button. For one things like the app switcher feel so much faster and more fluent with the swiping. And for another I always feared the home button would break, no matter how well built.
You can still have it. Just get the 2022 SE. why do people need supercomputers in their pocket, or why does it have to be the camera-iest or titanium etc?
I use my phone camera for supplemental video to my photography, so unfortunately I do kinda need the nice new cameras they’re putting on them. I have a 14 pro max right now and tbh I wouldn’t give up the screen space.
I dearly miss the precision video scrubbing from iOS 16 and I have no clue why they removed it. It was absolutely amazing and it’s now just replaced by… nothing. I miss it every day.
This isn’t really an answer to your question but it is related, and sticks in my mind as one of the biggest red flags of Apple’s constant enshitification after Steve Jobs’ death:
At some point in the Big Cat line of MacOS they either changed or forgot to implement a simple UI label change for a function—that being ejecting a “disk” (be it external usb device, optical media, application installer, etc.) the usual way to do it is of course dragging it to the trash—this has been the way in MacOS since time immemorial, and in the big cat series of the mid 2000’s when you performed this function the label “Trash” would change to “Eject” (the trash can would also change to an eject icon—icon may still change? I only have a Mac at work these days so can’t double check)
Anyway, this has been the case since about… 2011? Nowadays it just says “Trash” regardless of what you are either trying to delete or eject.
Other things like the angled corners of the new iPhones not really jiving with the swipe up of the buttonless models: this gesture made sense with the rounded edges of the iPhone 6–not so much the 12 and on.
The little touches that are missing these days just show that the company does not hold itself to the same QA standards it once did and clearly has some very disconnected / dysfunctional interdepartmental communication.
The music app has gone downhill and been badly degraded ever since ohhh IOS 10? When they moved to streaming services they prioritized that and removed clear ratings, access on Home Screen to volume and progress of currently playing song and many other things.
The widgets you add to the home screen aren't the same as this Today View. Know how you side left from the first page, and it has a widgets view? The iPad had the option to keep that view permanently on the screen and bunch the icons to the right. The option was called "Keep Today View on Home Screen":
Not iOS , but on MacOS, I hate window design in recent versions. The old versions had a clear distinction between single contents and the great/darker ‘chrome’ that made up the window header and toolbar.
These days everything is a blinding white (in daylight mode) both virtually no contrast between the two.
With multiple overlapping windows it is a complete pain to use. Loads of times I’ve gone yo grab the top of a window, only to hit the window behind and above.
Form over function.
I didn’t realise how bad it was until I used my wife’s old Mac running an old version of the OS and everything was just easier