iPhone 16 Pro and 16 Pro Max hands-on: don’t call it a shutter button

I just spent a few minutes with the new iPhone 16 Pro and Pro Max, which feature bigger displays with thinner bezels, revamped cameras, and Apple's new Camera Control button, which is pretty fascinating.

Let's start with Camera Control, which is a physical button - it depresses into the case ever so slightly, with additional haptic feedback from Apple's Taptic Engine to make it feel like a chunkier click. It's not just a shutter button, although you can use it like one and click away to fire off photos from the 48MP main camera with zero shutter lag. I was not able to slow it down in my short demo time, but we'll see how that goes in real life.

The reason it's not just a shutter button is that it's also a multifunctional capacitive control surface. The physical button itself is ultrasensitive, so pressing it ever so lightly brings up swipe-to-zoom controls, and double-pressing it lightly brings up additional controls you can swipe between, like lens selection, exposure, and the new photo styles available on the Pro. It took me a second to determine how hard to press, but it wasn't hard to figure out. Apple says that as part of a software update later this year, the button will get a two-stage shutter function that will allow you to lock focus and exposure.

It was pretty seamless to switch between the various photo styles with swipes, but it was hard to see how much they were actually doing in the perfect lighting conditions of Apple's demo area. But I am very curious about them.

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I ran into Apple's Phil Schiller, and we chatted briefly about the Camera Control button. I wanted to know about the balance of using the button as a classic camera control versus the beginning of the camera itself becoming an input method for Apple Intelligence, and he told me that it was really both, which is fascinating.

The iPhone 16 Pro has a 48MP "Fusion camera," a new 48MP ultrawide camera, and a 12MP 5x telephoto camera - which, on the regular iPhone 16 Pro, has the tetraprism design that was exclusive to the iPhone 15 Pro Max. The iPhone 16 Pro will also be able to capture 4K video at 120fps, and you can adjust playback speed after capture in the Photos app.