Wired
For iPhone 15 Pro and 15 Pro Max users, replacing the traditional toggle physical mute button with an action button with customizable functions will indeed provide greater flexibility in use. The good news is that it has recently been said that the iPhone 16 series released next year may fully introduce action buttons.
According to foreign media citing suspected internal Apple documents, Apple may plan to completely switch to the action buttons first seen on the current generation iPhone 15 Pro/15 Pro Max in the iPhone 16 series next year, and may switch from the current physical buttons to Capacitive button design makes it easy to add richer operations (such as force feedback response input). The news indicates that this set of improved action buttons, internally codenamed Atlas, will actually operate more like the Touch ID Home button previously used on older iPhones, or the Force Touch trackpad configured on MacBooks.
This set of improved action buttons, which are expected to be fully configured on iPhone 16/16 Plus and iPhone 16 Pro/16 Pro Max, will bring richer functionality through built-in sensors that can detect pressure changes and tap switching operations. Operation and even gesture input methods. It is reported that Apple is currently testing improved action buttons of different sizes for the iPhone 16 series, including models that are enlarged to be close to the size of the volume buttons of the current iPhone 15 Pro series.
Source: MacRumors