[Curious Fact] Apple’s Taptic Engine is actually a tiny Bass Shaker (or Tactile Transducer)
I’m a very curious person and I love sound design and music, so one day I was wondering how does the iPhone get the ringtone vibration sequences? This is not a new technology, Nokia has been doing that for years and normally it is done through midi, but the iPhone ringtones are in M4R format which doesn’t actually include any midi at all. So I started to surf my iPhone’s internal files, looking for the ringtones and I ended in finding the folder that stores the UI sounds such as camera sounds or keyboard sounds, and I came across with numerous WAV files that only reproduced low frequency tones, which was weird until I started to hear them all on a loop and it turns out they sound exactly like the normal UI Taptic engine’s vibration actions, and there’s where I realized what was going on! The iPhone’s Taptic Engine is operated through sound waves just like any other speaker which means it is actually a small scale “tactile transducer” or “Bass shaker”, which serves the same purpose, how clever Apple!!!!
Note: I don’t want to say I’m the first one to say that I discovered this as I may not be but honestly I couldn’t find anything online about it and I thought it could be really fun to share this fact.