Taking the chance to appreciate hardware features while they're still around.

preamble

For years, one of our hobbies has been candid photography - quick shots of unexpected moments. We do so at purely an amateur level; phone or VRChat camera, generally default settings, and if posted, they're probably unedited.

Primarily it's a way to help us remember things, but we do know that we've helped some friends smile because they've never seen themselves laughing in the moment like that; the mundanity of life not captured so often as the spectacular. When everyone else has their cameras pointed in one direction, we'd often rather capture the photographer(s).

Since 2019, we've upgraded our phone every 2 years [1] pretty much exclusively for the cameras - we lost some people close to us that year and found we didn't have good enough photos of them - and so, the upgrade cycle formed part of the reminder to capture what you can while you can.

That meant that 2025 was an upgrade year - and so, we ended up with the iPhone 17 Pro in Cosmic Orange. This is not a general phone review - it's an iPhone, it does the same things as every other modern iPhone, but Nicer and with an actual bold colour choice for once.

a swipable button

While we appreciate things like the better telephoto and ultrawide cameras compared to the 15 Pro, the biggest change has been Camera Control, introduced in 2024's iPhone 16 line - acting as physical camera button with a press, a quick way to toggle settings by swiping against it, and (sigh.) by holding it down you have the ability to send a photo to Google or ChatGPT.

Like a lot of things Apple does, it's overengineered in ways that can make the product worse. The default configuration on the 16 line was apparently to have every category of camera settings enabled. This is a problem because the gesture for switching between categories is an awkward double half press [2], and if you're trying to do everything that way, you'll miss the shot.

The default configuration of the 17 Pro swings in the other direction; everything disabled other than the basic press for camera/shutter, hold for Visual Intelligence. To that default configuration, we've added in the option to switch between the iPhone's camera lenses only - and also changed the main camera activation gesture to require a double press.

And that combination is powerful, particularly for someone that likes getting photos as they come out of the camera. With a double click, with the single exception of if we're playing Pokémon Go in the foreground [3], it's straight in the camera and ready to capture. Without repositioning our hand, we can swipe to change to any lens (including the selfie camera and the 2x/8x "virtual lenses") and press in to take the shot.

That makes a big difference in an environment like our recent trip to Vancouver (and Vancoufur) - environments where there's both a lot to see that's not always right for the 1x lens, and where we tend to have one hand occupied with our walking cane.

And that's not functionality we've had from any other phone we've used. Some of the things can be replicated with the iPhone 15 Pro's Action Button, but it's small, awkwardly positioned for some grips, and it can't be used as a shutter button without giving up all other functionality [4], which feels like a waste. It also has no way of handling the lens switching.
We have older Windows Phone devices with a physical camera button, but again, no switching between the lenses. It's a magic trick.

There are rumours that in an upcoming line, Apple is going to remove the capacitive element to the sensor - for it to be one of the rare things advertised as features to truly go away rather than evolving. And at least to us, that's a shame. We did not particularly mourn the loss of 3D Touch as one example - being somewhat heavy handed, it kind of always ended up more annoying than magical - but we certainly would miss this

But I suppose we have a few years to come to terms with it.

footnotes

  1. 2 years seemed like a nice mix of affordability for us, plus the balance of new features vs. diminishing returns. It also means that in Apple's cycle of "introducing new features" vs. "improving last year's features", we tend to end up on the improvement year, which works for us. I can see this going to 3 years in future, though, as those returns continue to diminish. ↩︎

  2. As a great philosopher once mused (paraphrased), "a press is a press, you can't say it's only a half". ↩︎

  3. We've removed or reduced a lot of other mobile games as timewasters at this point, but Go persists - on some days, it remains that little extra incentive to head out and walk somewhere. But we are also at a point at it where we're OK making slow progress towards the new level cap. ↩︎

  4. But being fair it is pretty close to the volume buttons, which also act as shutters. ↩︎