Goodbye, home button? Get ready for iPhone's biggest change

It may sound impossible to imagine an iPhone without a home button. But in some ways, Apple has been preparing users for this eventuality for years.

When Apple unveils its new high-end iPhone on Sept. 12, it's widely expected to do away with the most iconic part of its handset: the home button. If the rumors are true, the all-screen design of the so-called iPhone 8 means no room for a bottom bezel, and thus no room for a physical home button (and its Touch ID fingerprint sensor). It will be the biggest design change to hit the iPhone in its 10-plus year history -- a radical change to the most basic usage element that has existed on the phone since day one.

A glyph that appears in the HomePod firmware could be the rumored iPhone 8.

Or maybe it won't be that shocking a change at all. 

In fact, Apple has been nudging millions of iPhone owners with changes to homescreen navigation for the past several years. There are already pieces in place to suggest the transition may not be as wild and weird as you might expect. Android phones have already done it, and the iPhone can do it too.

The current iPhone's no-click home button could be training wheels for how the iPhone 8 will work

Here's the funny thing: The iPhone's home button is already gone. Instead of a physical button, 2016's iPhone 7 and 7 Plusfeatured a solid-state panel that used subtle vibration to simulate a button press. It initially drew mixed opinions: some felt the click was weird; others liked the haptic thump. But the point is, I got used to it, and most people I know did, too. It feels a bit like a real button, but it's not. And maybe that's how the iPhone 8 display will work, too.

Enhanced vibration (called "Taptic Engine") give the iPhone and Apple Watch their taps and thumps, and it already does a few things on the iPhone 6S and later models to feel tactile in iOS 10 (scroll wheels in settings, or pressing in on app icons). Pressing in on a part of the screen will probably feel the same as pressing in on the solid-state home button does now. The bigger problem, of course, becomes how to relocate that Touch ID fingerprint sensor -- or come up with a replacement. (More on that below.)

Control Center is an app launcher away from being the home button replacement

iPhones currently stick four apps at the bottom of the home screen, locking them in place as you swipe to additional pages: useful, but inefficient. Swiping up for the Control Center usually accomplishes more, getting to settings and even some app shortcuts fast. Control Center is getting expanded in iOS 11, where it now offers a single page of user-configurable widgets and switches. But if that same updated Control Center page had a mini dock at the bottom for those same apps -- and/or a virtual home button -- it would basically be a one-stop shortcut. The problem with exiling the home button to the dock, though, is that it turns a single action -- pressing the handy home button that we have now -- into a two-step process: swiping first and then clicking the screen.

For more info head over to  CNET.com