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How to tweak 3D Touch, the beloved feature Apple looks set to kill

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3D Touch can be awesome, or annoying.
3D Touch can be awesome, or annoying.
Photo: Charlie Sorrel/Cult of Mac

Apple may or may not be ready to euthanize 3D Touch. My view is that it sticks around, neglected and unloved, forever more. Like Dashboard on macOS. (Yes, Dashboard still exists.)

That would be a shame, as 3D Touch really is an excellent augmentation to a touchscreen device. It’s also quite tweakable. Here’s how to adjust how it works, and — if you really hate it — how to turn 3-D Touch off altogether.

How to quickly take charge of your photos with 3D Touch

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3d touch photos
Depending on where you are, 3D touching a photo offers different options.
Photo: Cult of Mac

3D touch is the feature that keeps on surprising you. Just when you thought you’d discovered all its tricks, up pops another one. Today we’re going to see how pressing on pictures in the Photos app offers all kinds of handy shortcuts for wrangling Faces, Albums, and Moments.

How to use 3-D Touch to select and manipulate text

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3-D Touch makes iPhone text selection as easy as it is on the Mac.
Photo: Cult of Mac

At launch, 3-D Touch was seen as a bit of a gimmick. A very neat gimmick, but perhaps not a useful one. Over time, though, it has become as natural as using your finger to jab at an icon on the screen. And no part of 3-D Touch is as crazy useful as text selection. That may sound a little dull, but if you ever got frustrated trying to place the iPhone’s “cursor” precisely between some letters in order to correct a typo, you will L-O-V-E love this tip.

Quick Tip: 3-D Touch Control Center icons for some surprising shortcuts

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Look at all the neat stuff you can do with Control Center, just by pressing a little harder.
Photo: Cult of Mac

It pays to experiment with 3-D Touch, the feature that lets you press harder on your iPhone’s screen to get extra functions. But while we may be used to force-touching app icons, there are all kinds of other spots where it works. For instance, you press on the row of icons at the bottom of the Control Center to access some fantastic shortcuts.

4 features the Apple Watch 2 doesn’t need

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Apple Watch 2 concept by Eric Huismann
The Apple Watch 2 may not look like this, but we'd be fine if it did.
Photo: Eric Heisuman

After the rumblings and grumblings that we’ll get our first look at the Apple Watch 2 in as soon as three months, the Internet is ablaze with all of the great features the update “should” have. But let’s not go overboard, here, because not all of these suggestions would make the new wearable better.

We aren’t talking about Android compatibility, complete independence from its paired phone, or a better battery life; we’d welcome any of those updates in a second. But we couldn’t really see a need or want for a few of the rumored/desired new features, regardless of how crazy awesome they might seem at first.