No headphone jack on any iPad anymore?!? 😳

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jebni

@tja said:
@jebni Yes, that's the "feature", and for Air 5, you cannot disable it.
So, they just exchanged the two buttons effectively.

Oh right, I misread the article and thought you could still turn it off. The new behaviour in portrait orientation would be the killer for me — my buttons are on the long side (i.e. “up/down” in portrait as a pseudo-default), so I’ve got a spatial memory of whatever’s on the left being “volume up” when in landscape, which in my brain would override their “reading direction” rationale, which does kind of make sense. It’s the mirror image of your experience. I would love the new behaviour if I bought on of these newer models.

I do think it’s a tough problem to crack if the aim is to maintain some sort of orientation agnosticism AND have dedicated hardware buttons, AND acknowledge that landscape is now the pseudo-default in so many use cases. And if your buttons are on the short side, the uppermost button always being “volume up” in landscape makes total sense from a logic standpoint, even if it bucks previous mental habits, which were “unnatural” accommodations.

Meanwhile, like many other people, I made the transition to (“reverse”) “natural scrolling” on trackpads quite easily when it was introduced. If I didn’t have the experience of direct manipulation via touchscreen, it would have been hell, and I respect that for many people it was still hell. It also helps that I abandoned all mice in favour of trackpads and touchscreens a decade ago. If I hop onto someone’s laptop who has refused the new default, I have to make a mental adjustment: “okay, there’s an imaginary scroll wheel under my fingers that is pushing the imaginary piece of paper under it in the opposite direction”.

I guess my point is that while I understand your pain, any interaction conventions that involve any abstraction from “direct manipulation” are vulnerable to these kinds of changes, which feel kind of inevitable to me. (I love arguing with my son about inverted controls in gaming. “YOU’RE FLYING A PLANE!” “WTF DO YOU MEAN I’M IN A PLANE?”)

I do think those transitions have been managed badly on the iPad. The orientation problems could have been avoided if they had doubled down on landscape as soon as keyboard cases became a thing, or if they had never used physical volume buttons. But I can totally understand their torturous design journey. I recall Steve Jobs using the iPad almost exclusively in portrait in the first demo, besides for watching videos. It made sense. If only they later did what Steve was notorious for — completely and aggressively reversing course when they recognised that reality was somewhat different. Remaining in ambiguous territory for so long got us into this mess. Who wants to use a five year old Pencil with a Lightning charger on a new iPad?? Madness.