Almost everything is easy to do on a smartphone these days. Until I want to take a picture. Suddenly, I’m juggling my iPhone to unlock the device—my fingers are fumbling around for the right shortcut—before my kids or pets cease to be cute again.

But the new iPhone 16 and iPhone 16 Pro are introducing a new, dedicated button just for this task. Called the Camera Button, it sits below the power button on the right side of the iPhone’s case, where your SIM card used to go. Covered in sapphire crystal, it’s both touch sensitive for swipes and tactile to allow you to press it like a shutter.

To take a picture, you tap it once to load the camera. Then you press it to take a photo—complete with haptic feedback of a mechanical shutter. On the iPhone Pro, you’ll even be able to press the button halfway to focus, just like on a traditional DSLR camera.

When you’re not clicking the shutter, you can slide your finger to zoom-in while a small, notch-like UI pops on the screen called Camera Control, which reveals a virtual radial dial. (Tap twice, and you can bring up more settings, like depth of field and exposure. Meanwhile, third-party apps, like Snapchat, can also program this button for custom controls in their own context.)

From the looks of Apple’s demonstration, photos will be easier and faster to take. For those wanting to turn their phone from portrait to landscape mode, the ergonomics at play speak for themselves. Suddenly, the iPhone looks less like an iPhone and more like a traditional-film camera, comfortably balanced in your hand with the shutter button right on top where it lived for the decades that preceded our smartphone revolution.

Now, Apple power users will quickly point out that you could already take a photo using your volume buttons, or even program the Action Button to pull up your camera. But very few people actually customize any function of their phone. To assign the camera shutter a dedicated button will ensure the vast majority of us actually use it.

But the longer play here seems about more than just photos. During Apple’s iPhone event, the company also demonstrated a “visual intelligence” feature that allows you to photograph a concert poster while it pulls dates of that concert and adds it to your calendar, or combines photographing a restaurant with googling more about it, automatically. Exactly how these functions will interact or overlap with third-party apps, which can also assign functions to this button, is still unclear.

In other words, Camera Control is a gateway to visual AI. It’s a way to bring artificial/Apple Intelligence literally closer to our fingertips and our captured media, making visual search and analysis that much more accessible. In other words, this new Camera Button could be the most significant, seemingly tiny design decision Apple has made in years.