Is Apple forcing users to abandon cut-and-paste on handsets?

I know this won’t be a favorable viewpoint, but I have to ask the same question that Matt Miller is asking: how big of a deal is it that there’s no cut-and-paste on the iPhone platform? I won’t argue the usefulness of such a feature, but in my year of iPhone ownership, I think I’ve really only missed cut-and-paste three or four times at most. Now don’t just answer off the top of your head: put some serious thought into your handset usage first. Of course, everyone uses their handset in different ways, so I expect opinions to vary wildly here.

As I sit and reflect on this "missing" feature, I find that it’s not really missing at all in the use cases I need it most. Certainly not on any regular basis. If I want to share a URL with someone, one of the most common times you want a cut-and-paste function, I simply use the "Mail Link to this Page" feature in Safari. I think the most recent instance of wanting cut-and-paste is when I wanted to e-mail a photo to Flickr. I couldn’t remember the e-mail address to send the image, so I had to hit the Flickr website and look it up. Cut-and-paste would have been handy there, but I worked around it and created a new e-mail contact with the e-mail address. Yup, I had to manually type it, but it’s a once and done thing. Now that I have "Flickr" as an e-mail contact, I don’t need to type it again.

Personally, I’m not missing the feature all that much and I wonder if Apple is really trying to get away from adding it at all. They drove consumers to abandon start abandoning floppy disks with the iMac ten years ago; are they at it again? If they are, can you live without "cut-and-paste"? Like millions of others, I have for the past year… all by Apple’s design. In fact, I suspect they’ll continue to improve the UI in situations where you might want to copy and paste data. Anyway, think it through and once you’ve arrived at your answer, hop over to Matt’s post: he’s taking a vote on the issue.