Does a replacement home button have to have the ribbon cable?

When I took apart the phone I didn't see a way to swap just the home button. Although I didn't look incredibly hard to find a way so it might be possible. It just didn't look easy enough for us to sell the part and encourage the repair. I can tell you that the electronic switch for the button is housed in the ribbon cable instead of on the logic board as with previous models.

The new button does not require a new ribbon. The electronic switch is easily scrapped off the old and placed onto the new.

It does scrape off (or, more precisely, peel off) from the back of the plastic button — there's actually a really nice grooved recess into which the Home button switch "decal" sits just perfectly. Really the only catch with replacing this piece is properly seating the other end of the Home button switch ribbon cable — the tip of its "tail" back into its tiny harness. It wouldn't be such an issue except that you pretty much have to reassemble the entire phone, with layer upon layer of electronics components covering up this junction, just to be able to turn on the phone and test to see if the ribbon cable has been plugged in to the harness far enough, or otherwise correctly. And if you didn't, you need to disassemble the whole thing all over again. Why Apple couldn't have put a nice, neat little "plug" on the end of this ribbon cable to make a a neat little socket connection (like the rest of the connections in this phone) is beyond me.

I have had similar travails seating the keyboard ribbon cable on my MacBook Pro into its much longer harness, but that's a story for another day…