Donald Trump lets the world know he misses the iPhone’s home button

By Trevor Mogg Published October 26, 2019

If you miss the iPhone’s physical home button, you’re not alone. President Trump misses it, too.

How do we know? Because The Donald tweeted it to his 66 million followers on Friday evening.

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Addressing Apple CEO Tim Cook directly, Trump wrote, “To Tim: The Button on the IPhone was FAR better than the Swipe!”

To Tim: The Button on the IPhone was FAR better than the Swipe!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 25, 2019

Trump swapped his Android handset for an iPhone in early 2017 when all of Apple’s handsets still had a physical home button.

In the same year, the tech giant launched the iPhone X, the first Apple handset to feature an edge-to-edge display — and no home button. With the new design, users had to swipe up from the bottom of the device to access the home screen.

The timing of Trump’s tweet lamenting the loss of the home button suggests he recently upgraded to one of Apple’s latest handsets — the iPhone 11, 11 Pro, or 11 Pro Max.

But despite Trump being one of the most powerful people in the world, we don’t see Apple changing course and adding a physical home button to the iPhone 12 when it comes out (probably) next year.

What to do …

Solutions? Well, Trump could dive into his iPhone’s settings and add an in-display home button (Settings>Touch>Assistive Touch — more detailed instructions here), or consider returning to Android for something like Samsung’s Galaxy S10 and Note 10 phones, which have in-display home buttons. Though considering the importance of his job an’ all, he’d want to be sure it has the fix for that dodgy fingerprint scanner.

But if Trump really wants a home button and an Apple phone, he’ll have to switch to the iPhone 8, which Apple continues to sell, or consider the iPhone SE 2, if and when it appears.

Contributing Editor

Not so many moons ago, Trevor moved from one tea-loving island nation that drives on the left (Britain) to another (Japan)…

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