The iPhone 16e didn't kill the home button, it just anointed a new one

Turns out Apple's new iPhone SE wasn't an iPhone SE at all.

Yes, the iPhone 16e is still Apple's cheapest new phone, but this time around Apple dropped the SE branding and, with it, changed a lot of major things you might expect from the SE line.

For one, the iPhone 16e is now $600 which is more than one might expect from a "budget" phone (you can argue it's actually not a budget phone at all now).

That price bump comes with a lot of perks, however, including the A18 chip which is also in the iPhone 16, an OLED screen, Apple Intelligence, and a 2-in-1 camera system that integrates a telephoto lens.

In all of that, however, there's one thing that the new iPhone doesn't have — a home button. In a lot of ways that's a big "duh" and in some ways it's the end of an era — an era that centered around real buttons.

But before you mourn the death of physical buttons on your iPhone, let me introduce you to the "SE" line's newest addition...

Welcome the the Action

Expectedly, Apple finally dropped the home button from the iPhone 16e.

That's no surprise considering the button was a bit of a vestige for some time — pretty much ever since iOS started using a swipe-up method of returning to your home screen that obviously doesn't require pressing a physical button.

The decision to move away from a physical button marks the death of that particular design in Apple's lineup and while it may seem like a clear move away from physical buttons in general, the home button's ethos still lives on with a newer addition to the iPhone design language: the Action Button.

For the uninitiated, Apple's Action Button was initially introduced in the iPhone 15 lineup to pro-level phones only and was later brought to every level of the iPhone 16.

The Action Button is exactly what it sounds like: a programmable button that people can use for lots of different stuff — launching apps, pulling up Control Center in iOS, or even changing focus modes on your phone automatically.

And now, that button lives in the iPhone 16e which gives Apple's most budget-friendly new phone all of the same abilities — and one more.

If you're missing the home button dearly, you can program the iPhone 16e's Action Button for a similar purpose by assigning it a shortcut. To make the Action Button take you home on a single press, all you have to do is:

• Go to Settings
• Tap "Action Button"
• Navigate to "shortcuts"
• Type in “Go to Home Screen” and assign that as the shortcut

Sure it's not going to bring that big button back to the middle of your phone's display (the Action Button is on the side of your phone), but it's going to give you a similar functionality.

But even more than that, it's giving us something that iPhones nearly lost altogether over the years...

Touchy-feely

As much as tapping and swiping has become an effective way to navigate any device, burying things inside your phone's software hasn't always been... simple.

Whether you're a fan of the home button or not, it did make returning to your home screen simple.

That's because there's a facility with button-pushing that can be hard to mimic in a phone UI that often has no choice but to bury functionality inside windows and menus.

It's clear that Apple has recognized that flaw in iOS which has (for better and worse) become increasingly more complex as the years have gone by. As a response, it's turned to the real, physical, world with the addition of the Action Button, but also a "Camera Control" button.

Apple's Camera Control button occupies a very similar space to the Action Button and can be used to launch the Camera app in iOS or even as a shutter button to take pictures or record videos.

It's a simple thing, really, but an important acknowledgement that sometimes software doesn't have to do all of the work.

So, while it's easy to mourn the home button and the simplicity it brought to the iPhone experience, it's clear that Apple knows one cold, hard, capacitive truth: buttons sometimes do it best.