Apple’s Touch Bar was a failure, but the iPhone 16’s new Camera Control shows that Apple has learned from its past mistakes in order to make something better.
Apple revealed a lot of new products and features at the ‘It’s Glowtime’ event earlier this week, but the best moment of all? For me, it was when Apple showed off the Camera Control, a new touch-sensitive button on the iPhone 16 range that lets you snap photos, change the camera’s focus point, switch between controls for depth of field and zoom, and more. You can press it to take a picture, or lightly press and swipe to scroll through various camera controls. For something so small, it packs in an awful lot.
It perfectly encapsulates that elusive Apple magic inside a button that can do so much in some very clever and intuitive ways. It’s the sort of thing that, like so many Apple features, will spawn a legion of imitators, but none will come close to the original.
It reminded me of another attempt Apple made at a touch-sensitive strip with multi-function capabilities: the Touch Bar. This was a thin LED ribbon that sat at the top of the MacBook’s keyboard. Its functions could change depending on the app you were using, giving it the ability to adapt to your needs as they changed throughout the day.
That was the theory, at least. In practice, the Touch Bar was a failure. The problem was it never got enough support from third-party apps to make it truly indispensable. It also required you to lift your hands far away from your keyboard and trackpad, thus interrupting your flow.
