This home button/fingerprint reader combo is taking up so much precious real estate on what is a small device, and I just don't get it. It seems like bad design to me.
The jury is solidly still out on the "better" part. There's no consensus between customers on this topic. Manufacturers who placed the fingerprint sensor (and power button, earlier) on the back, or even the side despite the clear disadvantage of having a tiny sensor, did so to make the bottom bezel slightly smaller, not because of proven better ergonomics. And given the opportunity they switched back to the front, under the screen. Most also chase thinness at the price of smaller batteries which says nothing about the soundness of the decision.
> This home button/fingerprint reader combo is taking up so much precious real estate
The button is there because the design comes from a time when the screens were small so on-screen buttons were a waste, and the body needed to be large enough to accommodate everything else. This phone is an iPhone 8 with a better SoC. It's not a new design or even a redesign.
The design isn't bad, it's old. And it's old so it can be cheap. They achieved a worthwhile result a pricepoint where at the very least it provides exceptional software support and a current generation SoC. There are few phones that serve that segment (OP5 was pretty much the last one in the price range - good SoC, OKish support, regular old bezels). You can freely sacrifice this for better screen to body ratio phones if that quality is more appealing.
The design features relevant for this discussion (bezels, physical button) didn't come out with the iPhone 8. I'm counting the age of the design since it was first introduced, not since last use. It is an old, successful design which leads to a cheaper phone.
> It doesn't save money to do it this way.
Of course it does. Any new design and part made for this phone implies extra expenses - new tooling, assembly lines, supply chains, etc. This drives up the cost and price of the phone. And you can't save money by sharing/reusing too much of what you have in place for your flagship line because for every $400 phone you make you took capacity away from a $1000 phone. So old stuff gets reused. You get a much cheaper phone by slightly upgrading the $300 iPhone 8 than the $800 iPhone 11. Works like this in every industry.
They got rid of the button and the fingerprint sensor in one go, so there was never an opportunity to have just a fingerprint sensor on the back.
