The last thing the iPhone 17 Pro needs is yet another button

Between now and September, you can expect pretty regular updates on the imminent iPhone 17 launch. It’s par for the course at this time of year. We’ll hear about specs, design, prices, and color finishes, each report getting a few things right, a few things wrong, but gradually building off the existing consensus to get closer and closer to the full picture.

But one story over the weekend was a little different. An anonymous tipster got in touch with MacRumors with news that the iPhone 17 Pro will get three previously unknown camera upgrades. First, an increase in maximum optical zoom from 5x to 8x. Fair enough: that’s a new claim, but it largely fits with the 7x we were already expecting. Second, Apple will either deliver a new pro camera app or a major upgrade to Final Cut Camera. Again, new but not unreasonable.

And the third rumor? There will apparently be a second Camera Control button.

Wait, what? Yet another button? Now this, surely, is madness.

If you ask me, the iPhone has too many buttons already. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve accidentally triggered the existing Camera Control on my iPhone 16 Plus, because it’s in a spot where the middle or ring finger of my left hand would naturally land when picking it up. (It’s such a common issue, Apple has a whole set of Accessibility settings to mitigate it.) The edge of a phone isn’t just dead space; it has a function, which is to accommodate the user’s hand, and there’s a limit to the number of hardware controls you can add to this space before it starts to become inconvenient.

The Action button on the opposite edge causes me problems in a different way. It’s next to the volume controls, which I habitually use by touch, but the presence of a third button complicates that interaction. Instead of feeling for the two buttons and pressing the top or bottom one depending on what I want to do, I have to carry on exploring the edge to establish whether there’s another button above or not. It’s not exactly rocket science, but when you just want to turn down the volume without looking, it’s adding friction to what should be a simple and intuitive process. The mute toggle was far easier to distinguish from the volume controls; the Action button is too similar.

Button down

Apple’s approach to hardware used to be rather different. It would add hardware controls only as a matter of last resort; more commonly, it would strip them away ruthlessly, carving away at the marble of extraneous complication to reach the work of minimalist art within. I even wrote an article about the company’s fear of buttons, arguing that it should prioritise usability over elegance. I still think that, but unfortunately, Apple’s new addiction to adding physical controls (the Apple Watch Ultra has an extra button, which I kept accidentally triggering while testing it) is bad for usability and elegance.

Jim Martin / Foundry

Adding a button to an existing product should be a big deal. Product managers should be forced to stand sweating in front of a fierce committee to justify the change. Why is this necessary? What will it add? What will it cost? What will customers think? And how will it change their relationship with the product?

Your mileage may vary, and I may be an atypical user, but I don’t feel that I get anything out of the Camera Control or the Action button. I have (willingly) used Camera Control perhaps two or three times since I finished writing my quasi-review. And while I use the Action button all the time, I virtually always use it as a mute switch, a vital job which the toggle does better. In both cases, the change has achieved almost nothing, while interfering with the way I use the device and messing with my muscle memory.

So no, I don’t want another Camera Control, thank you very much. The good news is that, realistically, we’re probably not going to get one. The tipster is anonymous, so we can’t compare this prediction with a proven track record of accurate claims in the past. MacRumors acknowledges that it hasn’t been able to corroborate the information via other sources, and says “skepticism is obviously warranted for now.” It’s a hardware change, and they usually leak much earlier than this through prototypes and supply-chain sources. But above all, it just doesn’t make a lot of sense to introduce one button that does the same thing as another.

Maybe I’m wrong about this and Apple is planning to further complicate the iPhone’s exterior design. This would, after all, fit with the trajectory of the past couple of years, with Cupertino adding the Action button in 2023 and the Camera Control in 2024. Maybe adding an unnecessary extra button is going to become a yearly ritual: the Selfie button in 2025, the Airplane Mode button in 2026, the Buy A Vision Pro button in 2027 (be careful you don’t press that one by mistake!). Maybe. But probably not.

And that’s a good thing, because after years of not including enough buttons, Apple has gone wildly too far in the opposite direction.