The iPhone 17 is here. As I'm watching folks get the new iPhone Air and other new Apple accessories online, I've been reminiscing about how excited I was to upgrade to the iPhone 16 last fall. I was ready to channel my inner photographer with the nicer cameras, not worry too much about charging it every night, thanks to better battery life and -- very exciting to me -- to have a phone in a new Barbie pink color. But what I didn't expect was that one new addition would threaten to ruin my entire experience with my brand-new phone.
If you've upgraded from an older iPhone in the past few years, you might have been surprised to see two new buttons on the newer devices: the action and camera control buttons. The action button is a small button above the volume adjusters. It was introduced with the iPhone 15 Pro models and is a customizable button that can do anything from turning your ringer on to ordering your Dunkin' coffee to go. It's small, demure and minds its own business.
It's the camera control button that causes all the chaos.
Camera control is a new button on the iPhone 16 lineup that does what the name suggests: It controls your camera. It's meant to help you quickly snap photos and serves as a shortcut to launching your camera app. You can slide your finger through a mini settings menu to adjust your camera's zoom, among other things. But there's one true reason for the button's existence: AI. All of the iPhone 17 models have this button, too.
Like every other tech company, Apple has been heavily investing in artificial intelligence. Apple Intelligence has been the driving force behind much of the company's innovation, with lots of AI updates in the new iOS 26. But there's no bigger sign of Apple's dive into AI than the camera control button. It's the physical pathway into Visual Intelligence, a new AI-powered feature that lets you use your camera to scan objects in the real world to get more information on them. It sounds snazzy, but it's completely pointless to me, and it's a feature I have never been enticed to use.
There are other use cases for the camera control button, including ways to customize your button's settings, as my colleagues have found through their testing. But that doesn't change the fact that my camera control button is so completely annoying.
It's a long button, about the size of the power button, located on the lower right side of the device. And it's very, very easy to tap by accident. I've opened my camera while putting my phone in my pocket, while I'm driving and using navigation apps and once as I was turning off my phone for the night, which left the camera app open the whole night and drained my phone's battery.
And if that wasn't annoying enough, every time I actually intended to open my camera via camera control, it took several taps to do so. Go figure.
While I had camera control enabled, my camera roll included stunning shots like these:
I couldn't tell you when or where these photos got accidentally taken. Katelyn Chedraoui/CNET
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