Along with the dumping of the headphone jack, Apple could also be preparing to replace the iPhone’s physical Home button with a touch-sensitive “Force Touch home button.”

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The claim was made by analysts at financial services firm Cowen and Company and reported by Business Insider.

The analysts cite “field checks” to support the firm’s claims.

Cowen and Company also expect the headphone jack to be dropped and for the new iPhone to be waterproof.

All this fits in with other claims that Apple has been examining ways of getting rid of the physical Home button — a common failure point for the iPhone — and that the replacement button would use haptic feedback to simulate a click.

It should be noted that the Home button on the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6S is touch sensitive in addition to being a physical button, but the touch-sensitivity is only used to activate the Reachability feature.

This would presumably mean that the iPhone would still need some sort of physical reset button that could be used in the event of the hardware crashing (for situations where a software-controlled button might not work).

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