Re: iPad 3 and iOS 6 - Home button not working

Athelas,

Your situation seems to confirm my hypothesis. Upgrading to iOS 6 causes intermittent issues with your home button. However, not all iPads upgraded to iOS 6 have this problem. So upgrading to iOS 6 (or just having iOS 6 from the factory) is a necessary but insufficient condition for buttonitis (thanks for this latter term, wwwheaten!). In addition to the presence of iOS 6, one needs a unit that is not up to par in the construction of its home button.

This is an extremely frustrating problem for anyone who has it, because its intermittent nature precludes being able to reproduce it on demand at an Apple Store. But being able to reproduce it is a condition of having it fixed under warranty! An additional source of frustration are the various 'home remedies' for this problem that are out there on the internet. These are ultimately temporary or inconvenient, and therefore unsatisfactory.

I can only hope that Apple is slowly becoming aware of the widespread nature of this problem, so that they will give the benefit of the doubt to affected users.

Keep in mind that with gestures turned on in settings, you can reproduce the entire functionality of the home button without the home button:

Need to close an app? Five-finger gesture pinch.Need to get to the multitasking bar? Four-finger gesture upwards.Need to get jiggling apps out of 'jiggly-mode,' after you've rearranged them? Hit the On/Off Sleep/Wake button at the top of the iPad (the black button on the edge of the aluminum). That darkens the iPad. Hit that button again. It wakes up in locked mode. Now slide the lock switch on the screen from left to right. You're now at your home page and the icons aren't jiggling any more.

There is only one other function for the home button: double-clicking it while in locked mode gets you iPod audio controls while leaving the device in locked mode. Unfortunately, to accomplish this corner case there are no substitutes for a functioning home button. Thankfully it's a rare need, I suppose.

Still, it's galling to have an expensive device that forces you to do any of 1-3 above. But if you do have buttonitis and you cannot get it fixed (because you can't reproduce the problem in a store, or you're not under warranty), then doing 1-3 above gets you just about the entire functionality of the home button for the vast majority of users.

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