Before you roll your eyes, know that this is coming from the biggest Apple fan boi. I own almost every single apple product line (except the mac pro) and yes that does include the ultra expensive Apple Vision Pro.
Apple (the Jobs era) used to have a very simple philosophy. They focus on one thing that's it. They build the best products. And part of that is saying
1000 no. They release a product only when it is ready. They add a feature only when a customer will be delighted. Their record is not always 100% perfect, sure there are misses. But you can exactly see how they miscalculated, and know that their original intention is to bring joy to customers.
Fast forward today, Camera Control is none of that. Camera Control does not bring anyone joy. It's marketing gimmick that one would expect from any other tech companies but not Apple. At best, users are different and at worst it's hair pulling level of frustration to use. Let me explain.
First, as
gruber correctly pointed out. It's incredibly frustrating that pressing it does not always open the camera app. It depends on the state of the phone. If the phone is not 'activated' - i.e. on the AOD mode. Pressing it in fact does nothing. If you wake the phone - either by touching the screen, or by waiting for the accelerometer to pick up motion, then pressing it opens the camera.
Contrast this to the action button. It will always launch it no matter what.
Second, the position of the button is very compromised for landscape shooting. I have larger hands but even for my index finger, it's not longer enough to be bent all the way above the iPhone frame. What you end up doing is, having the finger lay over the top right portion of the screen. One, that obstructs the screen as a viewfinder of the camera, and two it accidentally touches the screen sometimes.
Third, for almost all the half-press functions, they are vastly inferior to the on screen controls. Take zoom for example, it's physically much slower to go from 1x to 5x. Whereas by using the expanded half circle dial, you can zoom to 25x with even less time. Not to mention that with Camera Control you cannot zoom to small increments, like 2.5x.
So to put things in summary, here's where we landed
| Camera Control | Action button |
| Launches app consistently | 50/50 | Always |
| Shutter control | Works but sometimes misread as half presses | Always |
| Video control | Hold to record | Hold to record |
| Zoom control | Works but slow, coarse control, bad index finger positioning | Fast with on screen, granular control, perfect thumb positioning |
| Additional camera controls (exposure, aperture etc) | Hard to access, not user friendly | on screen controls are equally hard, most users dont use it |
There is in fact, no reason to use the camera control button over the action button. Other than the fact that, by degrading your camera launching experience you reclaim the action button for other uses. Which might be worth it for some users...
So this really begs the question, what is Apple doing? Well my theory is this.
I think camera control was suppose to be used with a hold action to launch. This makes it so that it launches 100% of the time, not 50. It's also suppose to be launched with a half press function that provides unique ability. Exactly what, I dont know. But it could've been, something related to cinematic mode or something. It's slated to launch later this year to control focus, but iPhone cameras have such small aperture that you have very deep depth of field all the time anyway which made no sense. They must have some other uses in mind to justify a whole hardware button built around it.
Likely what happened was, that they caved to the investor pressure of AI features. So (1) they repurposed the hold action to now be 'visual intelligence' and (2) they released this hardware/software early and dumbed down the half press feature.
So here we are, not only is Apple releasing a half complete feature (which I'm ok with) but they've butchered whatever original design concepts they had in the name of AI such that even WHEN those features are eventually complete, the end result will be crippled. In the end we will have an unnecessary hardware button to call upon AI (in additional to Siri - so now 2 AI buttons) coupled with a downgraded experience to launch camera or triggering the shutter (compared to any of the existing methods - action button, slide left on lock, press hold bottom right button)
This is where the shift in Apple’s philosophy since the Jobs era starts to show its cracks. It’s depressing, because the old Apple got right on things that no other companies were able to get right. I guess not even the Apple today.
