One of the most interesting iPhone 15 rumors appears to no longer be happening. Following a report from Ming-Chi Kuo that Apple had scrapped plans for the solid-state buttons on the iPhone 15, expected supplier Cirrus Logic has informed shareholders that it will not be supplying Apple with the chips necessary to make the buttons work.
“Among the HPMS opportunities we have discussed, a new product that we mentioned in previous shareholder letters as being scheduled for introduction this fall is no longer expected to come to market as planned,” Cirrus Logic, which previously supplied the iPhone 7’s Lightning-to-3.5mm dongle, writes in the letter (via Macrumors). “As we have limited visibility into our customer’s future plans for this product at this time, we are removing the revenue associated with this component from our internal model.”
Of course, that could mean Apple has simply found another supplier for high-performance, mixed-signal chips or is making them itself, but it’s more likely that the feature has been scrapped. Cirrus notes that it doesn’t know whether Apple will be attempting the buttons for the iPhone 16, but we’ll be getting a whole bunch of rumors about that soon enough.
The solid-state buttons were all but confirmed for the iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max until recently. In an analyst note, Kuo claimed that due to “unresolved technical issues before mass production,” Apple had decided to forgo the feature, which would have added individual haptic sensors for the volume and power buttons and introduced a new Action button to replace the mute switch.
Some reports say Apple is still pressing ahead with the Action button, but it will be a standard click-through button now rather than a solid-state one with force touch. Apple has had a mute switch on the left side of the iPhone since the first generation launched in 2007.
The iPhone 15 Pro is expected to launch in September with several new features, including a titanium design, an improved camera system, and an A17 processor.
Author: Michael Simon, Executive Editor
Michael Simon has been covering Apple since the iPod was the iWalk. His obsession with technology goes back to his first PC—the IBM Thinkpad with the lift-up keyboard for swapping out the drive. He's still waiting for that to come back in style tbh.