iPhone Diary: iPhone 16 Pro Max ordered, with Apple managing to surprise me

I said before the keynote that I expected to be ordering an iPhone 16 Pro Max, and that was going to be largely down to the functionality of the Camera Control button. This turned out to be an even stronger draw than I’d expected.

Despite the button itself inevitably leaking beforehand, Apple did manage to keep a lot of its functionality secret …

Apple gave me more than I expected

We first heard about this almost a year ago, and it was subsequently confirmed by leaked CAD drawings and dummy units. We referred to it at the time as a dedicated Capture button.

I said last month that this was likely to be a bigger deal than it might have sounded, given that it was reported to combine a shutter release button with half-press and capacitive swipe.

The swipe function was said to be for zoom, and it sounded to me like that might get close to a feature request I made back in February: a hardware focus/zoom ring. I said at the time that zooming smoothly while shooting was tricky on a touchscreen.

The problem is that doing this smoothly is very tricky when sliding a thumb on a sheet of glass. The inevitable variation in pressure applied when holding the phone at the same time means that the friction is also variable, so it’s not unusual to get nothing happening followed by a sudden jump – rather than the smooth movement we’d want.

I imagine that parents videoing their kids running around might find the same thing. What’s needed for smooth focus-pulling and zoom is a hardware control.

At the time, I didn’t imagine this would ever be built right into an iPhone, so what I was envisaging was an accessory case. However, what Apple has done is … build it right into an iPhone.

Now, granted it’s not the wheel I’d love, and we’ll have to wait and see how much better a capacitive button is than a glass screen in terms of delivering smooth and reliable control, but the fact that Apple has introduced it suggests confidence that it will at least be an improvement on the touchscreen.

But Apple went even further.

That same double-half-press action lets you select other controls, like (artificial) aperture, for changing the depth of field; exposure compensation for lightening or darkening a shot; and photo styles, which let you preview filters while taking the shot.

We won’t get full access to all of the button’s functionality until later in the year, but this combination of features was enough to sell one to me.

Other camera improvements

I said beforehand that I’d be looking for other camera improvements, and Apple has indeed delivered these.

I covered those in a separate piece, but I’m particularly looking forward to trying out the 48MP Ultra Wide lens. The ultra-wide camera has so far been very much the poor relation to the main and telephoto cameras, offering notably poorer quality, so I’d love to see a big improvement here.

I’m also looking forward to trying the audio-mixing capabilities when shooting with the built-in mics.

There’s also the marginally bigger screen, but I’m not expecting that to be particularly noticeable.

Watch this space

My pre-order process wasn’t the smoothest I’ve ever experienced. The Apple Store app not only lost my pre-selected order details, but also lost my card details!

That slowed things down, but thankfully I still got a day one delivery date. I’ll of course be sharing my experience of the new model, including some side-by-side comparison photos between iPhone 15 Pro Max and its replacement.

Photo: Apple