The iPhone 17E Is Missing a Major Feature, but Here's Why That's a Good Thing

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Apple announced the iPhone 17E this week, and with it came a surprise: MagSafe support for magnetic charging and accessories. For an entry-level iPhone, I was expecting an updated processor and maybe more storage (both of which it got), so MagSafe is a nice bonus.

But one major iPhone feature didn't make the jump: the Camera Control button. And I'd say that's the right choice.

The Camera Control is simultaneously an ingenious idea, a masterwork of precision engineering -- and an utterly frustrating experience. It echoes the ergonomics of using a traditional camera shutter button, but creates complications in the name of cleverness. Of all the recent iPhone advancements, this is the one I most want to work well, which is why it's also the most disappointing.

As cameras take on a bigger role in smartphones (not just for capturing photos but also for powering AI features), phone makers like Apple and Honor are adding dedicated physical buttons to reduce friction when launching tools like visual search, camera controls and other AI-powered features.

A hardware solution a long time coming

As a professional photographer who also writes and podcasts about photography, I embraced the introduction of the Camera Control on the iPhone 16 and iPhone 16 Pro. Holding a phone horizontally like a traditional camera, my right index finger naturally landed on the top edge of the phone where the button was to trigger a capture.

Since the early iPhone models, people have tried to make the one-handed phone camera work. There have been hand grips with physical shutter buttons that plugged into the phone's port or connected via Bluetooth. The third-party app Camera Plus first came up with the idea of assigning the hardware volume buttons as triggers, and then Apple implemented it in a later iOS update.

But that involved remembering to bring and attach the accessory, or turn the phone the correct way (clockwise) to put the volume buttons in the right place. The dedicated Action button on the iPhone 15 Pro only complicated things further, making the volume buttons even harder to access.

The Camera Control is intended to fix all of that friction. It's a button that sits nearly flush with the right side of the iPhone case that can be pressed. But it's also a capacitive touchpad that registers finger movement and light pressure to control more than just the shutter -- essentially a small, thin version of the trackpad found on Apple's laptops.

Brilliant! With a full press, you can take a picture. A light press brings up a small hidden menu of options to control camera settings such as exposure compensation, zoom, and simulated depth (akin to an aperture setting). When the menu is visible, sliding your finger across the surface changes the settings' values, like you would a tactile control dial on a regular camera.

In theory, everything is at your fingertips. In practice, well…

My love/hate relationship with the Camera Control

The advantage of the control's placement is also its disadvantage. That precious real estate is also where people tend to grasp the phone, accidentally opening the Camera app when picking up the phone or triggering the Camera Control menu when the app is running.

It's also where clamp-style phone mounts grab onto the body. If you're setting up the iPhone on a tripod or in a selfie stick, the clamps too often press against the button just enough to register an action and lock out the screen controls.

But for me, the bigger problem is the button's sensitivity. It's too easy to accidentally bring up the menu of controls and switch to a different zoom level or change the exposure unexpectedly. When you're taking photos, you want to be precise about those settings, and the Camera Control ironically takes away some of that control.

So, like a city forced to retrofit a building that isn't structurally sound, Apple has added a slew of settings to compensate for areas where the Camera Control experience is leaning askew. In Settings > Camera > Camera Control, you can choose whether a light press or a swipe (or both) will activate the control, and which of the six options appear and in what order. An Accessibility submenu also includes settings to finesse what counts as the light-press force and the speeds for double-clicking and double-light-pressing.

Three iPhone screenshots showing Camera Control settings.

Perhaps most damning (and yet useful) is the ability to just turn off the Camera Adjustments option, so the Camera Control menu doesn't appear. After more than a year of trying to make this clever tool work, I finally gave up and turned it off.

You can still use Visual Intelligence on the iPhone 17E

One other purpose for the Camera Control button is to activate Visual Intelligence, an AI-powered tool that lets you identify nearby objects and perform actions based on what the phone sees. Press and hold the button to bring up the interface that activates the camera and uses AI to identify and act on things in the real world (like scanning a poster to add the date of a play's performance to your calendar or translate text) or ask questions about what the camera sees.

Because Apple wants its AI on all iPhone models, there's still a way to activate the feature on the iPhone 17E (and older iPhone models) even without a Camera Control. Set up the Action button (above the volume buttons on the left) to trigger Visual Intelligence. Go to Settings > Action Button and swipe sideways until Visual Intelligence appears. Once it's set up, long-pressing the button will open the Visual Intelligence interface.

It's likely the real reason behind the omission of the Camera Control on the iPhone 17E comes down to costs -- that tiny masterwork of engineering doesn't come cheap after all -- but it seems like a smart one either way. It also fits Apple's long-standing upsell strategy: someone eyeing the $599 iPhone 17E might be tempted to spend just $100 more for the iPhone 16, which has the Camera Control button, Macro mode and the Dynamic Island. The iPhone 16 also has an A18 chip instead of an A19, but for most uses, that's not much of a difference.

Now that the iPhone 17E has been announced, I can look ahead to iOS 27 and iPhone 18 and continue to hope that all my Camera Control irritations will be solved by then.

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