Nerdy Details: The Apple iPhone 16’s Camera Control Button

This transcript was generated by an automated service. In some cases it may be incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription errors.

Rich: [00:00:00] Gosh, I also have two little kids, a two and a half year old and a six year old, and they both do the funniest stuff, but, um, having camera control, being able to Get you up and running and capture that video. I mean, I, I have videos that, uh, just probably wouldn’t have been captured otherwise.

Evan: Welcome to design tangents podcast from cool hunting, exploring the creative processes and inspirations that drive change makers. I’m Evan Ornstein.

Josh: And I’m Josh Rubin. Today. We’re at the Apple podcast studio in Cupertino. Yesterday’s iPhone 16 announcement. This is a very special, let’s call it nerdy details episode of design tangents, where we’ll be digging into the iPhone 16 new camera control button.

Evan: And we’re joined by two longtime Apple employees, Johnny Manzari and Rich Din. Who’ve been around lots of products, but have been involved with the phone for a couple generations, and we’re excited to dig into that a little bit, Johnny. Can you just tell us a little bit about your journey? How you how you got here?

And what do you do here?

Johnny: Yeah, I am a human interface designer. And I work in the Apple design studio, which is this really interesting space. It has designers from a very diverse set of backgrounds, whether you have a human interface, industrial design, motion design, graphic design. Sound, haptics, color, materials, all sort of in one studio.

That’s a really inspiring place to come in and work every day. How did you find your way to, to human interface design? When I was in college, I wasn’t really sure what I wanted to do. You know, when I grew up, just probably pretty normal. And freshman year, I was taking a psychology class and this professor comes in by the name of Cliff Nass.

And he gives this talk about human computer interaction. He had this thesis that human computer interaction could be informed by human human interaction, and that the principles were fundamentally the same. Now today, this is maybe pretty obvious to people, in fact we have a whole thing called conversational interfaces, where it really does feel like you’re interacting with another human.

But this was the late 90s. I didn’t know that you could even have a job like this and I was incredibly hooked. So I followed up with them and that’s kind of how I got started on the journey. And you’re also a photographer? I love photography. I I have two little kids, and so, uh, a lot of my photos are just family, family photos and family moments.

When my daughter who’s in high school now was little, you know, I was using a lot more traditional camera equipment back then. And over the years, it’s really shifted to iPhone. And it’s been really nice to leave that sort of equipment, um, behind. It’s just much easier to hang out with your kids when you’re not bringing a lot of equipment with you.

I also love landscape photography. I was in Iceland. I was taking pictures of the Northern Lights, and I had brought this big backpack full of, you know, traditional equipment. Then I also had had my iPhone with me, and it was just an eye-opening experience. My favorite photos were my iPhone photos, and part of it is that, you know, it’s so windy and the ground isn’t very stable.

It’s like quite wet and muddy, and if you’re doing these very long exposures, things come out a little bit soft. But because the iPhone is stacking up these very, very short exposures, you, even if it’s windy, you still end up with really beautiful, sharp photos. And it does a great job of kind of exposing the movement of the lights.

So it’s been a really fun journey for me just personally to see all this evolve.

Evan: Rich, what about you? Tell us, uh, how you got here.

Rich: So I lead the, uh, iPhone, uh, design team among a few other teams, uh, and we’re just a group of engineers that love to build ideas. And we work really closely with human interface design, industrial design.

And then just a huge group of technologists, engineers, and operations folks that really bring these new ideas to life. I studied mechanical engineering at Cal with a focus on design, uh, and I really, I really always enjoyed aspects of, of design as a kid. I remember growing up and, and building Lego, that was, Legos were my, my medium for design.

We didn’t have a lot of toys as kids. As kids, my brother and I would build them. I would be the one that’s building the ones that look interesting and he would build the ones that have a big sales and stuff sticking out that are functional. Um, but I, I, I think I also kind of knew I wanted to be an [00:05:00] engineer looking back now because I would throw them off the second store balcony and see if they would survive and so.

That, that kind of led my journey into engineering and then over into Apple.

Josh: I love that

Rich: you

Josh: realized so early that the build is critical to realize the design we see so many people and you know, that, that kind of go down the engineering path or go down the design path and then have to figure out how to work well with the collaborators to bring something to life and that you had this design perspective and understood pretty early that It needed to work or not explode when you drop it off the balcony is, uh, I don’t know.

I don’t hear about a lot of people that kind of see it from both sides.

Rich: I think, I think it’s about the people around you kind of supporting you and seeing that you are doing that and leading you into that career path that fosters those, those ideas.

Evan: Apple’s just debuted the 16th generation iPhone. Um, you both have been involved in several generations of that.

And obviously you’re. This is you’ve already packed up. This is done. You shipped this a long time ago. You’re working on the next products, right? So what are some of the things that you’re most proud of or excited about that have gotten us to where we’re at today?

Johnny: One thing you can probably see if you sort of step back and look at the evolution of the iPhone and the camera is.

In a way, this sort of consistent focus on very fundamental things, and I’ll give you, I’ll give you a few examples. In the studio, we talk a lot about this idea of accessibility and making tools that are really for everybody. And they’re tools that, although they may have a lot of sophisticated technology underneath them, they’re not hard to use.

They’re delightful. They may, they may be precise, but they’re also playful. And that is a theme that we’ve been working on for many, many years. And you can see it in the camera where you can give the camera to a small child and they can take a great photograph, but you can also give it to a professional photographer who is an award winning photographer, and they can use that same tool, but push on it, take it to the next level, elevate the entire experience and create.

Wonderful art. I’ll give you another example of something that Rich and I were talking about this morning, this idea of investing in these sort of timeless fundamentals. What I mean by that is things like composition, lighting, focus, and these weren’t singular features that we put out. These were things that we worked on for many, many years.

We’ve been in so many meetings together over the years to try to understand how we could make contributions to that space. When you look at these things, they’re really not singular features. These are journeys that we’ve been on, both when you think about the cameras we’re talking about in this, but also just stepping back.

Apple as a company in general is really focused on some of these bigger themes. That’s been the most rewarding part for me.

Rich: I’ve been fortunate enough to work on. the phone since the first one. I think sometimes people think we have a recipe that we’re trying to adhere to when we make these devices, when we think of these devices, and we really don’t.

Um, we really set off focusing on the customer experience, not trying to make new hardware, not trying to make new software, but really how do we move that customer experience forward and using your, your iPhone. And then two, uh, we really think about not worrying about how hard it would be in the future to.

To continue to design something that we have an idea around today. We think about how do we enable what we really want to accomplish and we set off to do that. And sometimes it takes us several generations to get there and build the experience that we think we want to bring to customers. And sometimes it comes really quickly, you know, but over the years, I think that that that ability not to feel like we’re we’re tied to a formula It’s really freeing as a, as a engineer and as a designer, um, that that’s kind of most exciting to me as I look forward as well.

I mean,

Josh: everything about the iPhone has evolved in such mind blowing ways since the first one. Maybe it’s because I’m a photographer, but I think a lot of people who just enjoy taking pictures probably agree that the camera evolution has been. One of the most distinctive pieces of the iPhone

Johnny: that that’s another whole fascinating thing that we could dedicate an entire thing to so

Evan: rich.

As I think about this, you’ve been, you mentioned you’ve been working on the phone since the first one. I imagine the first time the idea came up for a button to activate the camera probably happened a long time ago and not just a year ago. Um, how did everything come together to [00:10:00] decide that this was the right generation to introduce that?

Rich: It really Has become so much more than a button, but we didn’t set off thinking. Let’s, let’s add how, how and when can we add that button? We set off, uh, asking the question, how can we get closer to one of our visions in the camera experience, which is never missing a moment? And I think everybody can can remember that time when something magical was unfolding before you and you’re fumbling to get that moment captured.

And yeah. Uh, when you, when you say that and you look around the room, there’s always some smiles because everyone has that thing that’s happened to them and sometimes it’s just today or recently. So we started with that question, you know, how can we get closer to that? And if you think back far enough in time, uh, since you brought up the first phone, it’s kind of funny thinking that before, not too long before that, Uh, we all used to plan to bring point and shoots or plan to bring DSLRs or, uh, manual focus film cameras because we’re planning that something special might happen.

And when you fast forward to today, I think the magic of, of camera control is, is we’re hoping that fast capture experience is kind of getting us a little bit closer to that never missing a moment idea. So it kind of started with that question rather than a. Let’s figure out the generation to put in this, this button.

There’s the physical

Evan: device itself. There is all the software that supports it. And then there’s the camera technology,

Rich: right? All, all those things have to kind of, kind of weave together. Um, but when we, when we’re thinking about the, the design of, of camera control, since we are going to, to make this thing happen, we wanted to make sure that.

The design was, from a hardware standpoint, was really thoughtful in all the little details. So the, the amazing thing when you look, uh, at the button is it is flush. And so from the day to day use, we’re hoping that the phone feels very much like your, your phone today in terms of how you grip it and handle it.

But we’ve added a little chamfer in there to give the, that really lovely half press and full press experience. Uh, with the button flush. And then I think customers are gonna really notice it in the details when they look closely that we use the best materials. We wanted to make sure that it was a durable button.

We wanted to make sure that it was, uh, capable of, uh, IP68 water resistance and kind of lived up to that iPhone level of durability. And so you have Sapphire, you have stainless steel trim, and on the iPhone 16, you have aluminum around it. And all of those things also have to be color matched. Um, and, uh, I know you, you guys probably appreciate.

Uh, colors and different mediums and having to be able to match those materials on aluminum and PVD titanium on the pros. Again, I think it’s something that when customers pick it up and see and feel it, they’re really going to appreciate those types of details.

Josh: Well, and that, that kind of design is certainly what we get excited about when it’s invisible to people who don’t know.

But that also means that it’s not standing out as feeling. Wrong. But then because yeah, we, we deep on color and material, we can really appreciate how complex it is to achieve the simplicity in a button like this, where there’s, you know, you’ve got, you’ve got different materials, different textures, but you’re still color matched.

Um, with the, with, with that vision or that goal of never missing a moment, I’d love to hear a bit about the research that informed the interaction design for using this button, right? It’s not just a button that you can press. There’s there’s a lot more that you can do with it when you’re using it.

Johnny: If you go back to what Rich just said about understanding sort of these questions, if you take, if you take a relatively straightforward question around how to really make it easy to get into the camera and take photos and videos, but then you start to think about the group of experts you need to bring together.

To explore that question, to build experiential models, prototypes, start to list them off, you know, you need people from hardware engineering, you need people from software engineering, camera architecture, the sensor team. On the design side, uh, as I mentioned, you know, we’re lucky in the studio that we’re all just sitting together, industrial design, human interface, and, um, motion design, haptics.

So you start to, you start to realize it’s a very wide and diverse set of people that have to come together to start to explore these questions. And as we start building these [00:15:00] prototypes, we start learning and we start asking additional questions. One that I thought was, was really interesting was around video.

So we wanted to make sure that this button was fantastic. We’re not just getting in a camera and taking a photo or just taking a video, but the video that you wanted, meaning if you like 4k or if you’re particular about your frame rate, whether it’s 24, 30, 60, making sure that we delivered the video that you wanted.

We didn’t have that technology, so we had to go figure out how to, how to invent that so that camera control could work that seamlessly. So you have to go to camera architecture and you have to ask, could we do this? And they will return with a series of investigations and research and. Give you a sense of what the timings could be.

Then that becomes a human interface challenge. So you say, how do we create a choreography that goes from the photo aspect ratio to the wider video aspect ratio? Brings in Dolby Vision HDR and make the whole thing just feel very seamless to the customer when they do that click and hold. And that’s kind of what I meant with this really interesting working group.

These aren’t experts that work in silos and then sort of come together later. It’s all designed in unison. It’s all made in unison. It’s a singular group making a singular product. I think that’s incredibly exciting. Another, another one that sort of came through the discovery process was this idea of intent and intentionality.

The idea that by lightly pressing on the button, you could signal to the phone that you were intending to take a capture. That led to all sorts of interesting new experiences that we started to design. And Doing this kind of playfulness around removing distractions, really immersing you in that edge to edge preview at the same time, bringing in the singular adjustment of your choosing.

We started with zoom, really focused on composition, but you can, you can change it to a number of other things. And, uh, you know, as, as Rich said, none of this began with somebody coming into the room with this. Conceptualized idea that was fully resolved. And they said, we’re building this. It was, it was really a process of discovery and working together as a team.

Josh: I want to take a quick pause for a second for people who are listening or watching that might not have. You know, that might not have seen the keynote or might not be familiar with how the camera control button works. Can we just do a quick explanation of how it works?

Evan: I’d actually like to cut to break and then let’s jump into that when we come back.

So Johnny, you were going to talk about how the camera control works. That’s

Johnny: right. What’s exciting about camera control is that it delivers a lot of improvements on just the real fundamentals. So if you click it, quickly launches into the camera. Click again and it takes a photo. Click and hold and it will take a video.

All of this is without you needing to, you know, readjust your grip or make any changes. So it’s really just the fastest experience we’ve ever had. We think this is just incredible for everybody. And that’s why we put camera control on the entire lineup of phones. At the same time, we wanted to use it as an opportunity to elevate the camera experience.

And I mentioned this idea of intent and intentionality that comes with lightly pressing on the button. By lightly pressing on the button, we eliminate distractions. We sort of clear the user interface so that you can be immersed. And we bring in, um, an adjustment that you can change by sliding your finger on camera control.

So this is a combination of using a force sensor and a capacitive sensor on this mechanical button, which is an Apple first. We’ve never really done that before, but it unlocks all these new experiences. And depending on what your interests are, you can choose a different adjustment for camera control.

If you’re somebody who’s interested in composition, we have zoom, as well as a cameras adjustment that allows you to go between the optical cameras on your iPhone. If you’re interested in developing, we have exposure, as well as the new photographic styles and tone controls. And if you’re somebody that loves portrait mode, you can choose depth.

You can jump right in to choosing that aperture value. It’s almost like, you know, having that big lens look all the time builds on all the work we’ve done over the years to integrate portrait mode directly into the main photo mode.

Josh: I didn’t realize until you were just explaining that they’re just in, in terms of the [00:20:00] haptics, the full press is the button physically moving.

And you feel that click that feedback, but the, the half press and the double half press are, that’s actually, that’s triggered off of capacitive touch. And it’s, it’s a haptic engine in there, which is giving you that sense that you’ve clicked something, but you’re not physically moving the button. Is that right?

Rich: You are physically moving the button just a tiny little bit for the half press and we use that force sensor underneath to detect that tiny micron scale movement, send a signal over to the Taptic Engine and really give you that haptic feedback.

Johnny: And all those haptic waveforms, as I mentioned, I mean, we have experts that work on those.

That’s why these are so important to design as a singular team. And the feel is just fantastic. The goal wasn’t for you to necessarily need to immerse yourself in all this technology. It should just feel intuitive.

Evan: What I love about this moment where we’re at is. I’m a very serviceable photographer. I’ve used DSLRs and I’ve used cameras on phones for a long time and that suits a lot of my needs.

Josh is a professionally trained and awesome expert photographer. He uses, you know, things differently. And I feel what’s so exciting is that we’re at this point where People like me who have more modest needs have the, have increased capabilities to take even better images and video than we’ve been able to do in the past.

It’s kind of like it gives me enough and is helping me. But when you look at someone like Josh or other people who’ve been using these tools professionally, it’s also giving something really special to them and to do it all through the kind of the same software, the same button to me is really a testament to the quality of the design.

I like to think about big camera or small

Josh: camera, not. You know, whether it’s a phone or whether it’s a, you know, a mirrorless or DSLR or, or whatever it might be, and I carry the big camera less frequently because I don’t need to because the quality of what I can get off of the phone is, is there the ability to have all of the control that I want.

It has been there, but it’s been a little bit slower. So I’m excited to, to start using the camera control button and see how, how that impacts efficiency as an expression of what I consider the beauty of how Apple combines hardware and software and has teams collaborating and designing together and building together.

It’s a very impressive. Button, right? We’re, we’re, we’re talking about a button still, you know, we’re getting into a lot of detail about a button. I don’t know. It, it, it, it just, it has so much potential. I’m, I’m excited to see how it changes the way I take pictures. And I’m curious if having used it a little longer than we have, if it’s changed the way

Johnny: I’ve really enjoyed how easy it is to get into taking photos and videos.

The video piece in particular, I’ve noticed myself taking a lot more video. Sometimes, you know, these, these things are reducing a little bit of friction here and there, but it just sort of adds up to really a really new experience. The other one that I’ve noticed is, I think the composition, this is getting to sort of people who are maybe a little bit more, uh, particular, um, having zoom has really been exciting.

Uh, this idea of like really dialing in the composition has been interesting for me. Part of it too is just that it’s been more fun. I just have had more fun and that’s been so, that’s just been so great.

Rich: Yeah. For me, gosh, I also have two little kids, a two and a half year old and a six year old. And they both do the funniest stuff, but, um, having camera control, being able to get you up and running and capture that video, I mean, I, I have videos that, uh, just probably wouldn’t have been captured otherwise.

It’s super exciting because the kids see it, and you all know that when you ask someone to do something again, It just isn’t the same. So having that fast, that instantaneous capture to me has been, uh, amazing. The second thing is in video, like Johnny said, I’ll, I’ll double down on the Zoom. I’m, I’m probably more of the prosumer level, uh, you know, photographer and in being able to have Zoom control on your fingertips and have the screen.

Really free of any, um, obstruction to what you’re, you’re composing or what you’re seeing. You’re making these videos of family, friends, kids, whatever, and it feels cinematic. And you feel like you have this level of pro control that, uh, was there before, but it’s so accessible now and it’s so obvious now that I think people are really gonna love.

And so I’ve been, I’ve been just playing around with that a lot.

Johnny: Rich was talking about zoom and video. That’s another [00:25:00] one where there was a lot of work put into how that, how that behaves. in order to make the results feel like they have that cinematic quality. And it’s a, it’s worked from across the whole company, the sensor team, passing that information down into the architecture stack.

And then on the design side, just trying to understand how would a professional do this? You know, how would they do the ramps and pulling it all together? And again, it’s really, hopefully people don’t have to think about any of this. They’re just getting the video that they wanted their friends and family, but it’s really built off this really deep collaboration across the entire company.

Nice. I

Josh: love that.

Johnny Rich, thank you so much for joining us for this nerdy little conversation that we thoroughly enjoyed. Listeners. If you’re new to cool hunting, we’ve been reporting on creativity and innovation since 2003. Visit cool hunting. com or at cool hunting on social to see what we think is worth sharing.

If you enjoy

Evan: design tangents, please follow our pod wherever you listen. And every positive review that you leave is very much appreciated.

Josh: Design tangents is produced by surround part of the Sandow design group. Discover more shows from surround at surround podcasts. com emphasis on the plural. This episode was produced by Hannah Vidi and edited by Rob

Evan: Schulte.

Transcripts, show notes, and links for each episode of design tangents can be found on our show page at surroundpodcasts. com and on coolhunting. com. Also just want to, you know, remind people we did a really awesome episode with a former employee who was very involved in a lot of generations of the iPhone.

Miracle Borogro from our last season so shout out people to download that too.

Josh: And other Apple fans might enjoy the episode we did with Zane Lowe which was the first one of season two so check that one out too. Thanks for listening.