Apple's Decline Confirmed by the Flaws in Camera Control

Before you roll your eyes, know that this is coming from the biggest Apple fan. I own almost every single Apple product line (except the Mac Pro), and yes, that does include the ultra-expensive Apple Vision Pro.

Apple (in the Jobs era) used to have a very simple philosophy: they focus on one thing—that’s it. They build the best products. Part of that philosophy was saying “no” a thousand times. They only released a product when it was ready, and they only added a feature when it would delight the customer. Sure, their record wasn’t always 100% perfect, but even when they missed, you could understand their intention—it was always to bring joy to customers.

Fast forward to today, and Camera Control is none of that. Camera Control does not bring anyone joy. It’s a marketing gimmick, something you’d expect from other tech companies, but not Apple. At best, it’s merely different, and at worst, it’s frustrating to use. Let me explain.

First, as Gruber correctly pointed out, it’s incredibly frustrating that pressing it doesn’t always open the camera app. It depends on the state of the phone. If the phone is not ‘activated’—meaning it’s in AOD (Always On Display) mode—pressing it does nothing. If you wake the phone, either by touching the screen or by waiting for the accelerometer to detect motion, then pressing it opens the camera.

In contrast, the action button will always launch the camera app, no matter what.

Second, the position of the button is compromised for landscape shooting. I have larger hands, but even for me, my index finger isn’t long enough to comfortably bend over the top of the iPhone’s frame. What happens is that my finger ends up laying over the top-right portion of the screen, which both obstructs the viewfinder and sometimes accidentally touches the screen.

Third, for almost all half-press functions, they’re vastly inferior to the on-screen controls. Take zoom, for example: it’s physically much slower to go from 1x to 5x using the Camera Control button, whereas with the expanded half-circle dial, you can zoom to 25x much faster. Not to mention that with Camera Control, you can’t zoom to small increments like 2.5x.

In summary, here’s where we landed:

There is 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, here’s my theory.

I think Camera Control was supposed to be used with a hold action to launch. This would make it launch 100% of the time, not 50%. It was also supposed to launch with a half-press function that provided some unique ability. Exactly what, I don’t know. But it could’ve been something related to cinematic mode or focus control. It’s slated to launch later this year to control focus, but iPhone cameras have such small apertures that you have very deep depth of field anyway, which makes no sense. They must have had other uses in mind to justify building a whole hardware button around it.

What likely happened is that they caved to investor pressure around AI features. So, (1) they repurposed the hold action to now be ‘visual intelligence,’ and (2) they released this hardware/software early, dumbing down the half-press feature.

So here we are. Not only is Apple releasing a half-complete feature (which I’m okay with), but they’ve butchered whatever original design concepts they had in the name of AI. Even when those features are eventually completed, the end result will be crippled. In the end, we’ll have an unnecessary hardware button to call upon AI (in addition to Siri, so now we’ll have two AI buttons), coupled with a downgraded experience for launching the camera or triggering the shutter (compared to the existing methods: the action button, sliding left on the lock screen, or pressing and holding the 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 things right that no other company could. I guess even Apple today can’t manage that.