I repeatedly told you during the iPhone 16 rumors season that I wanted two things from the model I’d get and two things along. These were the phone’s rumored signature features: Camera Control and Apple Intelligence.
Six months and two iPhone 16 purchases later, I’m disappointed that both signature features are massive flops. In hindsight, there’s no point upgrading to any iPhone 16 model just for these two features alone. I say that as someone who used the iPhone 16 Plus for about two months, and is now on the iPhone 16 Pro Max.
The iPhone 16 is still a good piece of hardware and will stand the test of time. Whether you buy the cheapest iPhone 16e flavor or the most expensive iPhone 16 Pro Max, you’re still getting a great device that could serve you for several years. But I’m just sad to find that neither Camera Control nor Apple Intelligence are what I expected.
The only good things about Camera Control
I didn’t need to buy two iPhone 16 models to figure out the Camera Control button would not be as exciting in real life as it was in my mind.
I’ve been a longtime iPhone user who has always held the handset in my left hand. The iPhone 16 Plus showed me that the Camera Control button was unreachable. I needed to operate the device with two hands, so this defeated the purpose of getting to the camera app quickly.
However, the iPhone 16 Pro Max is slightly thicker, so the Camera Control button is a lot easier to press with my ring or little fingers. Taking photos is still difficult, and forget about using the button to navigate the camera menus.
I will say that I’ve been using the Camera Control button a lot more on the iPhone 16 Pro Max than on the Plus. I probably took close to a thousand photos on my recent marathon running trip, and I invoked the camera with the Camera Control button most of the time.
But I almost always tapped the screen to take a photo or used the Volume rockers.
Therefore, the best thing about Camera Control is its fast access to the camera app. You can start the camera from any screen much faster than before, and that’s a win.
Then again, I could always employ the Action button for that. Just pair it with the Camera app so I can start the camera and take photos with my thumb.
The Camera Control also has Visual Intelligence attached to it, but before I tell you how bad Apple Intelligence is, I’ll also say that Apple will bring Visual Intelligence support to the Action button on the iPhone 15 Pros. Camera Control button isn’t required.
There’s nothing good about Apple Intelligence
Apple Intelligence is an even bigger letdown than Camera Control, considering what just happened. Apple had to come out and say that the key feature of Apple Intelligence, the smarter Siri that will have access to all your on-device data and control apps, isn’t coming this year, as we were told initially.
Without that Siri, Apple Intelligence has nothing interesting left. Even the built-in ChatGPT support isn’t that exciting. I’m a longtime ChatGPT user who’d rather go for the iOS app rather than Siri to get to ChatGPT.
Remember that Apple Intelligence features were not even available when the iPhone 16 phones launched. We had to wait a few weeks for the first ones to arrive. I’m an iPhone user in Europe, so I got Apple Intelligence only a few weeks ago via the latest iOS 18 beta.
I wasn’t expecting Apple Intelligence so soon, and my excitement quickly vanished when I realized there was absolutely nothing I wanted to use it for. Even Visual Intelligence isn’t what I need, as it relies on ChatGPT or Google to get the job done. The smarter Siri wasn’t here, and everything else was useless for this iPhone 16 user at this point in time.
ChatGPT covers a big part of my AI needs, and even there I still don’t have access to all the recent novelties OpenAI launched in the past few months. That is, I use AI on the iPhone 16 all the time. I just do it via third-party standalone AI apps, where ChatGPT is my go-to AI tool.
Still, when Apple Intelligence rolled out in Europe, I thought we were on the verge of getting the first beta of that smart Siri assistant. That was still exciting. Now that Apple had to practically admit that Siri is vaporware, Apple Intelligence has lost its appeal entirely. I might as well turn it off on my iPhone and pretend I still can’t access it.
